A FrFT based method for measuring chromatic dispersion and SPM in optical fibers

A fractional Fourier transformation based method is proposed to blindly estimate the chromatic dispersion and self phase modulation in optical fibers. The experimental results demonstrate that up to 20,000 ps/nm accumulative chromatic dispersion of a fiber link is measured with the error less than 0.8%. If the chromatic dispersion is compensated by multiplying an opposite chromatic dispersion function in frequency domain, the 1st order chirp parameter caused by SPM in an optical fiber communication system can be measured by fractional Fourier transformation based method, i.e. the accumulative SPM of a fiber link can be quantitatively measured. The results of equalizing chromatic dispersion and self phase modulation in an optical fiber communication system demonstrated that the FrFT based method is promising to blindly monitor and equalize the chromatic dispersion and SPM of the fiber link in an optical network with dynamical routing function.