A novel optical signal-to-noise ratio monitoring technique based on Gaussian process regression

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel in-band optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) monitoring technique that uses a commercially available widely tunable optical bandpass filter to sample the measured optical power as input features of Gaussian process regression (GPR) can accurately estimate the large dynamic range OSNR and is not affected by the configuration of the optical link, and has the characteristics of distributed and low cost. Experimental results for 32 Gbaud PDM-16QAM signals demonstrate OSNR monitoring with the root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.429 dB and the mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.294 dB within a large OSNR range of -1 dB~30 dB. Moreover, our proposed technique is proved to be insensitive to chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion, nonlinear effect, and cascaded filtering effect (CFE). Furthermore, our proposed technique has the potential to be employed for link monitoring at the intermediation nodes without knowing the transmission information and is more convenient to operate because no calibration is required.