An apparatus for shared optical performance monitoring (OPM) is provided.
A wavelength sensitive device receives light at an input port and routes
it wavelength selectively to a set of output ports. To perform optical
performance monitoring on the output ports, a monitoring component of
each output signal is extracted, and these monitoring components are then
combined. A single OPM function is then performed on the combined signal.
However, with knowledge of the wavelengths that were included in each
output signal, a virtual OPM function can be realized for each output
port. The per port functionality can include total power per port, power
per wavelength per port, variable optical attentuation, dynamic gain
equalization, the latter two examples requiring feedback.