Optical Wireless Performance Monitoring Using Asynchronous Amplitude Histograms

Optical performance monitoring (OPM) aims to estimate the amount of distortion in optical networks. Its importance relies on building robust and efficient networks with self and dynamic diagnosis. In this work, channel impairment monitoring is investigated for optical wireless communication. The monitoring is achieved using a support vector machine (SVM) regressor. A cost-effective and straightforward acquisition system is used to build the training features, which are asynchronous amplitude histograms. Three different parameters related to three common channel impairments are monitored using these features:optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), visibility range, and ξ parameter related to pointing error. First, each parameter is monitored when there is only one isolated channel impairment. Then, each parameter is monitored when two and three jointly channel impairments occur. The results showed that using this low complex machine learning (ML) technique, the achieved prediction accuracy was very high ($>$0.98) for most channel conditions except for the monitoring of the OSNR parameter, where the prediction accuracy dropped to 0.86 under harsh channel conditions. Moreover, the superiority of ML-based techniques is compared with non-ML-based techniques for the OSNR parameter monitoring. The results indicated that the ML-based technique achieved high prediction accuracy than the non-ML-based technique, especially for harsh channel conditions.