A Novel Method to Monitor OSNR Using a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer

A novel method to monitor optical signal to noise ratio using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer is introduced. The OSNR meter is composed of two 3dB couplers, one phase tuner and one power meter which are of low cost. The experiments show that the error of our novel method is less than 0.5dB and the dynamic range is from 10dB to 25dB. They also show that the method works well under different cases of bit rates.