Reflection Considerations in Seeded DWDM Transmission Links

Abstract

This paper investigates the reflection phenomenon and its impact on the transmission of a seeded DWDM link. The factors that influence the choice of acceptable values of the optical return loss and maximum discrete reflectance are discussed and measured data is presented that provides insight into the penalty associated with the optical return loss. It is found that that the values used for optical return loss and maximum discrete reflectance in ITU-T Recommendation G.698.1 and G.959.1 based DWDM links cannot be used in seeded DWDM link specifications due to its bidirectional seeded architecture and the reflective nature of its colour adaptive transmitter at the terminal equipment.