Propagation Effects in Mixed 10G-100G Dispersion Managed Optical Links

The ability to deploy 100G channels in dispersion managed optical links loaded with legacy 10G traffic will come in handy to save on large CAPEX and operate progressive upgrades with no impact on existing traffic. The knowledge of the propagation effects generated by 10G on 100G channels is crucial in order to develop strategies to make the coexistence possible. We show that 10G channels generate both amplitude and phase noise on 100G channels by simulative observations in the polarization aligned worst-case scenario. Amplitude noise can be managed as the ASE and NLI noise with the SNR QoT. The DSP robustness to the phase noise intensity sets the guard-band. A further theoretical analysis for polarization multiplexed coherent transmission suggests that the guard-band approach can be effective to mitigate non-linear polarization effects.