Optical grooming switch with regenerative functionality for transparent interconnection of networks

Abstract

Abstract:We demonstrate a regenerative optical grooming switch for buffer-less interconnection of metro/access and metro/core ring networks with switching functionality in time, space and wavelength domain. Key functionalities of the router are the traffic aggregation with time-slot interchanging (TSI) functionality, the WDM-to-ODTM multiplexing and the OTDM-to-WDM demultiplexing of high-speed channel into lower bitrate tributaries as well as multi-wavelength all-optical 2R regeneration of several higher-speed signals. BER and Q-factor measurements of different switching scenarios show excellent performance with no error floor and Qfactors above 21 dB. ©2009 Optical Society of America

Progress in Multichannel All-Optical Regeneration Based on Fiber Technology

“…It is worth emphasizing that the robustness of this multiwavelength regenerating sub-system was confirmed in tests performed on a novel all-optical grooming and regenerating switch for interconnecting 130 Gbit/s-OOK core ring and 43 Gbit/s-OOK metro/access ring networks with switching functionality in time, space and wavelength domains [46][47]. This switching node was successfully demonstrated in both laboratory experiments [46] as well as in a real field trial [47].…”

“…Finally, in a third approach, which has been developed for WDM OOK signals, carefully engineered dispersive walkthrough maps in fibers are used to avoid the inter-channel crosstalk [30,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. In these schemes a high local average dispersion value ensures that the nonlinear inter-channel effects are significantly weaker due to the fast walk-off time among the various WDM channels, while a low overall average dispersion value ensures that the nonlinear effect used for the regeneration process itself (SPM) is sufficiently retained, Fig.1 (c).…”

“…It is, though, worth pointing out that, to date, SPM-based regenerators are the most promising ones due to their simple implementation and excellent performance and thus the easiest to be adapted for multi-wavelength operation if OOK signals are used. These types of SPM-based regenerators differ in their architectures, according to whether the various WDM channels all propagate in the same direction [30,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] or some in opposite directions [42][43][44][45][46][47][48] within the nonlinear fiber, see Fig. 1 (c.i-v).…”

“…1 (c.i-v). This can either be through a carefully tailored highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48], a dispersion decreasing fiber (DDF) [33] or chromatic dispersion-managed fiber assemblies [30,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Decision-threshold based filtering at the regenerator output may then be performed in a variety of different ways, namely the filter may be centered at the same wavelength as the original signal (usually referred to as a spectrally filtered optical soliton regenerator) [40] , see Fig The all-optical multichannel limiters that use spectrally filtered optical solitons rely on progressive pulse reshaping of the incoming signal during propagation in an anomalous HNLF at a precise input power (see Fig.1 (c.i)).…”

A dual purpose, all optical multiplexer circuit in InP, for multiplexing clock and NRZ data, and for transmultiplexing WDM to TDM

“…In the literature, a network concept that exploits this transparent grooming of traffic between access network and a metro core ring network is described in ref [1]. Whereas a regenerative optical grooming switch for buffer-less interconnection of metro/access and metro/core ring networks is demonstrated in [2].…”