Power penalty induced by Rayleigh backscattering in a bidirectional wavelength-reuse lightwave system

Summary form only given. Compared with unidirectional transmission, bidirectional transmission reduces the required number of fibers. The efficiency of bandwidth usage can be further doubly by using the identical wavelength (i.e. wavelength reuse) from both directions. Because the identical wavelengths are reused in the reverse direction, the signals generate from the counter-propagating signals is difficult to be eliminated by filtering. This noise degrades the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and system performance. We present the experimental setup to measure the BER performance of a bidirectional wavelength-reuse system. One distributed feedback (DFB) laser was externally modulated by 10 Gbit/s signal.