Wide range operation of regenerative optical parametric wavelength converter using ASE-degraded 43-Gb/s RZ-DPSK signals.

For sustainable growth of the Internet, wavelength-tunable optical regeneration is the key to scaling up high energy-efficiency dynamic optical path networks while keeping the flexibility of the network. Wavelength-tunable optical parametric regenerator (T-OPR) based on the gain saturation effect of parametric amplification in a highly nonlinear fiber is promising for noise reduction in phase-shift keying signals. In this paper, we experimentally evaluated the T-OPR performance for ASE-degraded 43-Gb/s RZ-DPSK signals over a 20-nm input wavelength range between 1527 nm and 1547 nm. As a result, we achieved improved power penalty performance for the regenerated idler with a proper pump power range.

Wavelength-tunable optical parametric regenerator.

We designed a wavelength-tunable optical parametric regenerator, where functions of reamplification, reshaping, and wavelength conversion are incorporated into a highly nonlinear fiber component. The uniform power transfer functions and negative penalties over a 20nm input wavelength range are experimentally demonstrated.

Microsecond switching of parametric tunable dispersion compensator.

A record-fast, 2 µs switching operation of an optical tunable dispersion compensator is demonstrated with a parametric tunable dispersion compensation scheme. We alternately switch two optical paths having different net dispersions with a microsecond guard interval of the compensator response and achieve successful transmissions of 43 Gbit/s non-return-to-zero on-off-keying optical signals. The error-free guard time for the switching of the two optical paths is 125 µs, limited mostly by the clock synchronization of the bit-error detector. The power penalty due to the switching of the compensator is less than 0.5 dB.