Quantifying the Impact of Physical Layer Effects in an Optical Multi-Band System

The exploitation of Optical Multi-Band (OMB) systems leads to the transmission of a higher number of channels which can in turn increase the overall network connectivity and capacity. However, in an OMB system, a power optimization procedure needs to be performed in order to avoid a severe performance degradation mainly due to the impact of inter-band effects. For this purpose, in this work, we exploit a recently introduced power optimization strategy which allows for a balanced Optical Signal to Noise plus Interference Ratio (OSNIR) between all bands of a five-band system, in order to quantify the impact of the main physical layer impairments in each band. We demonstrate that with the proposed power allocation methodology, the impact of all physical layer impairments can be balanced concurrently in all bands, increasing the number of available channels with sufficient attainable performance, leading in this way to an improved network connectivity.