Effect of bit pattern misalignment on coherent crosstalk in optical add/drop multiplexers

We studied the impact of coherent crosstalk on system performance in optical add-drop multiplexers (OADM's) in both aligned and misaligned bit pattern cases. The concept of fading penalty is introduced to evaluate the impact. The results indicate that bit pattern misalignment will reduce the impact of coherent crosstalk when the crosstalk level is low and the number of crosstalk paths is large, but will increase it when these conditions are not satisfied.