Impact of in-band and inter-band crosstalk due to multiwavelength optical cross-connect in a WDM network

An analytical approach is developed to evaluate the impact of in-band and inter-band crosstalk on the bit error rate (BER) performance due to a multi-wavelength optical cross-connect (OXC) in a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network. BER performance and power penalty results are numerically evaluated at a bit rate of 10 Gb/s and the factors that degrade the network performance are identified. The results show that for a 16times16 OXC, to achieve a BER of 10^-9 at a power penalty of approximately 1 dB with a relative component crosstalk of -50 dB, the presence of in-band crosstalk allows maximum 4 wavelength channels in a fiber and the presence of inter-band crosstalk allows maximum 24 wavelength channels in a fiber for a wavelength separation of 0.01 nm.