Investigation of bandwidth loading in optical fibre transmission using amplified spontaneous emission noise

The use of spectrally shaped amplified spontaneous emission noise (SS-ASE) as a method for emulating interfering channels in optical fibre transmission systems has been studied. It is shown that the use of SS-ASE leads to a slightly pessimistic performance relative to the use of conventionally modulated interfering channels in the nonlinear regime. The additional nonlinear interference noise (on the channel under test), due to the Gaussian nature of SS-ASE, has been calculated using a combination of the Gaussian noise (GN) and enhanced GN (EGN) models for the entire C-band (4.5 THz) and experimentally shown to provide a lower bound for transmission performance.