A method for measuring asymmetry in propagation delay of first and second links which connect a first node to a second node of a communication network. The method comprises measuring (101) a round trip delay of the first link. The round trip delay can be measured by transmitting (102) a test signal from the first node to the second node over the first link and receiving a reply to the test signal from the second node over the first link. The method further comprises measuring (105) a round trip delay of the second link. The round trip delay can be measured by transmitting (106) a test signal to the second node over the second link and receiving a reply to the test signal from the second node over the second link. A difference in the propagation delay of the first link with respect to the second link is determined (109) using the measured round trip delays of the first link and the second link.

An optical transmitter includes: a mapper configured to generate an electric-field-information signal from transmission data; a training-signal-generation section configured to generate a training signal; a training-signal-insertion section configured to insert the training signal into the electric-field-information signal; a driver configured to generate a drive signal from the electric-field-information signal into which the training signal is inserted; a modulator configured to generate an optical-modulation signal based on the drive signal; an optical receiver configured to generate an intensity signal indicating intensity of the optical-modulation signal; a training-signal-extraction section configured to extract an intensity-training signal corresponding to the training signal, from the intensity signal; a coder configured to generate a coded-training signal by coding the intensity-training signal extracted by the training-signal-extraction section using the training signal generated by the training-signal-generation section; and a distortion detection section configured to detect waveform distortion of the optical-modulation signal, based on the coded-training signal.

The estimation of an amount of chromatic dispersion using a training signal sequence is possible. A transmission method includes: a training signal sequence generation step of generating, as training signal sequences, a plurality of signal sequences having power concentrated in a plurality of frequency bands, the power concentrated at different frequency bands; a training signal sequence selection step of selecting at least one training signal sequence from among the plurality of training signal sequences generated in the training signal sequence generation step, a signal multiplexing step of generating a signal sequence obtained by time-division multiplexing the training signal sequence selected in the training signal sequence selection step with a transmission data sequence, and an electrical-to-optical conversion step of transmitting the signal sequence generated in the signal multiplexing step as an optical signal.