Assessment of optical network impairments through twelve distinct optical nodesat 10.66 Gbit/s

Experimental and modeling results are presented for transmission through 12 distinct wavelength-layered optical add–drop and cross-connect nodes at 10.66 Gbit/s with 38 channels. The signal impairments induced by filter concatenation and in-band cross talk are examined and found to have little effect on the overall signal quality, with combined maximum Q penalties of the order of 0.5 dB or less.