Multi-Band WDM Transmission Technology Exceeding Transceiver Wavelength Band

Highly Efficient Multi-Band Optical Networks with Wavelength-Selective Band Switching

“…This successfully demonstrated the feasibility of a BSN for a C+L-band scenario, which is an important step for efficient multi-band networking. Moreover, thanks to progressive development of AO-WC [18], [28], [29], it is expected that the feasibility of band switching operation will be improved in terms of operation band and amount of penalty. For instance, in [18], C-to-L, L-to-C, C-to-S, and S-to-C AO-WCs have been demonstrated, in which each AO-WC has almost the same conversion loss.…”

“…Moreover, thanks to progressive development of AO-WC [18], [28], [29], it is expected that the feasibility of band switching operation will be improved in terms of operation band and amount of penalty. For instance, in [18], C-to-L, L-to-C, C-to-S, and S-to-C AO-WCs have been demonstrated, in which each AO-WC has almost the same conversion loss. In [28], [29], the improved conversion-loss performance has been demonstrated.…”

“…6. With the regenerator model in [17] and assuming 100-Gb/s channel speed, the expected power consumption at the regenerators will reach 20,000 W. On the other hand, a single AO-WC, which can simultaneously handle 80 channels, will consume a few hundred W at most even when applying an optical amplifier to compensate for internal optical loss as described in [18]. Thus, the introduction of AO-WCs can suppress the power consumption for wavelength conversion by two orders of magnitude.…”

“…We prototyped an inter-band AO-WC based on degenerate FWM in a HNLF and implemented it in a similar manner to that in [12]. At this moment, each AO-WC actually has the insertion loss (also called conversion loss) of about 20 dB, and thus a C-or L-band EDFA is deployed within each AO-WC to compensate for the loss, just as in [18]. Egress WSSs equalized the wavelength-dependent gain of the inter-band AO-WC and EDFA.…”