Bit-error-rate measurements in optical fiber links: case of optical reflections

We have developed a special measurement set-uup to study the bit-error-rate saturation as well as the non-stationary behaviour of errors into optical links. We can regularly measure the errors in the time domain and, from this information, compute the classical bit-error-rate versus optical power; but we can also trace the temporal evolution of the errors which can then be analysed with statistical tools to extract a maxiumum o information related to the performance of the optical system. This set-up has been tested on a link with a controlled amount of optical reflections.