Investigation on all-optical regeneration of asynchronous dual-wavelength signals based on fiber-optic parametric amplification

Abstract

With the continued development of the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network, there arises an urgent demand for the research of multi-wavelength all-optical 3R regeneration. In this paper, a novel multi-wavelength all-optical regeneration scheme has been proposed. Using phase clock in the fiber-optic parametric amplification and polarization multiplexing, all-optical regeneration of dual-wavelength signals generated by two independent WDM transmitter is realized. Theoretical analysis is carried out for the operation mechanism of the amplitude noise suppression using the gain saturation of the parametric amplification, and re-timing using phase modulation with cascading dispersion. Dual-wavelength 10 Gbit/s signal optical regeneration is demonstrated experimentally. Experimental results show that the inter-channel nonlinearities like four-wave mixing and cross phase modulation are effectively reduced. In the single and dual-wavelength cases, signal to noise ratio improvements of at least 6.5 dB and 4.5 dB have been achieved, respectively, after regeneration. Bit error rate test shows that about 2 dB power penalty improvement is obtained in both single- and dual-wavelength operations.