Impact of Coherent and Incoherent Crosstalks and Power Penalty on the Optical Crossconnects

Optical cross-connects are one of the most important components in the dense wavelength division multiplexer based optical networks. The crossconnects suffer from crosstalk due to the different wavelength light path channels during the switching process leading to the deterioration in bit error rate (BER) and hence in the system performance. This paper presents the study of impact of coherent and incoherent crosstalk and power penalty on the optical cross-connects in WDM Networks. The effect of accumulation of coherent crosstalk at different stages of crossconnect has been also investigated and analyzed for the blocking probabilities. Results of coherent and incoherent crosstalk are compared to identify their impact on the working of the cross-connect. The results show that the crosstalk increases with increase in either the number of wavelengths per fiber or the number of input fibers. The result also illustrates decrease in the interference penalty by correlating the crosstalk contributions with each other at the appropriate phase angle. We show that an acceptable blocking probability due to crosstalk is achievable for active wavelengths in the WDM network. The present study can be used to model the possible number of routing stages in such networks.