Accumulation of nonlinear interference noise in fiber-optic systems.

Through a series of extensive system simulations we show that all of the previously not understood discrepancies between the Gaussian noise (GN) model and simulations can be attributed to the omission of an important, recently reported, fourth-order noise (FON) term, that accounts for the statistical dependencies within the spectrum of the interfering channel. We examine the importance of the FON term as well as the dependence of NLIN on modulation format with respect to link-length and number of spans. A computationally efficient method for evaluating the FON contribution, as well as the overall NLIN power is provided.