Optical transceiver performance monitoring and alarming systems and methods

An optical transceiver defined by a multi-source agreement, comprising:

• a host input/output interface connected to a host system;
• an encoder/decoder circuit connected to the host input/output interface;
• an optical assembly connected to the encoder/decoder circuit;
• a management interface connected to a host system;
• and
• a processor connected to a plurality of registers, the management interface, and the encoder/decoder circuit;
• wherein the processor and the encoder/decoder circuit are configured to process overhead based on framing and forward error correction from the encoder/decoder circuit to provide performance monitoring and alarming while preserving existing multi-source agreement specifications.

A method for providing performance monitoring and alarming for Optical Transport Network applications in a multi-source agreement-defined optical transceiver, comprising:

• (a) deframing a received signal;
• (b) processing overhead in the received signal;
• (c) storing performance monitoring data from the overhead in a plurality of registers;
• and
• (d) storing alarm information from the overhead in the plurality of registers;
• wherein steps (a)-(d) are performed within the multi-source agreement-defined optical transceiver such that existing multi-source agreement specifications associated with the multi-source agreement are preserved.