Design considerations for low-margin elastic optical networks in the nonlinear regime [Invited]

We demonstrate from a system design perspective that nonlinearity can be exploited to minimize the impact of system margins on system performance for both point-to-point links and elastic optical networks. A nonlinear interaction causes a 2 dB reduction in launch power to be reduced to <;0.25 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalty, and likewise, a 2 dB peak-peak (pk-pk) perturbation to the output ...