Evaluation of electrical equalizer coefficients for optical performance monitoring in DWDM networks

Presently, formerly independent autonomous optical links are growing increasingly into meshed networks making measures for performance monitoring and automated error analysis a necessity. At the same time adaptive electronic equalizers are becoming integrated by default into optical receivers in order to mitigate distortions which are ubiquitous on every fiber link. In this paper we investigate the possibility of using these already available components for identifying and quantifying optical distortions and thus, performing network monitoring without additional expensive optical equipment.