Format transparent, wide range and independent dispersion monitoring method based on four-wave mixing

In this paper we propose an improved all optical chromatic dispersion (CD) monitoring method based on highly nonlinear power transfer function (PTF) provided by four-wave mixing (FWM) in highly nonlinear fibers (HNLFs). This method can be applied for various modulation formats, including on-off keying and advanced multi-level modulation formats, without necessitating any changes of the hardware or software. Furthermore, it can expand the CD monitoring range beyond the limitation of Talbot effects and is insensitive to optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD). These improvements are achieved by optimizing the profile of the PTF curve and utilizing a sweeping tunable dispersion compensator (TDC) in combination with an extremely simple digital signal processing (DSP) to find the zero residual dispersion point. Numerical simulations are then used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.