Monitoring undersea WDM systems with optical add/drop multiplexers

Summary form only given. The newest generation undersea communication systems plan on using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) along with optical add/drop multiplexers (OADMs) to increase the network flexibility and information capacity well beyond current 5 Gbit/s single channel and 20 Gbit/s WDM systems. This paper summarizes novel experimental results using optical pre-emphasis to improve the performance of current single-channel monitoring techniques made on a 5000-km 8/spl times/2.5 Gbit/s optically amplified WDM system. The performance increase enables the monitoring techniques to be adapted to future undersea WDM networks with OADMs.