  Data centers require high-performance network equipment that consume low
power and support high bandwidth requirements. In this context, a combinatorial
approach was proposed to design data center network (DCN) equipment from a
library of components in \cite{infocom}. This library includes power splitter,
wavelength multiplexers, reconfigurable add-drop multiplexers and optical
amplifiers. When interconnecting optical components, it must be ensured that
the resultant network supports specified target bit-error-rates (typically, at
most $10^{-12}$). This paper reports experiment conducted on component
interconnections and their computed bit-error-rates. From the experimental
analysis, it was observed that the desired objective can be decided by
considering a zeroth-order threshold for optical power at the receiver and
before the amplifier. This paves way for the theoretical evaluation of several
other such designs using this empirically derived model.
