An optical communication system that comprises a transmitter adapted to generate a signal by modulating a transmission data as low power consumption symbols of an amplitude modulation format and a monitoring data (MD) as high power consumption symbols of the amplitude modulation format, the MD comprising at least one transmitter parameter and/or at least one receiver parameter of communicating the transmission data. A binary logarithm of a total number of the low power consumption symbols and the high power consumption symbols is a non-integer.