Noise and crosstalk limitations in optical cross-connects with reshaping wavelength converters

Noise and crosstalk are two important limiting factors in optical networks with optical cross-connects (OXC's). If reshaping wavelength converters are used in the OXC nodes, noise and crosstalk are transformed into timing jitter which accumulates in the network and limits the performance. A method to evaluate the influence of jitter caused by noise and crosstalk in cascaded OXC's is presented and applied to three different OXC architectures, taking both coherent and incoherent crosstalk into account. In the analyzed architectures, the losses in the OXC and the coherent crosstalk is found to be the most important limitations.