Optical label processing by multiwavelength sampling using a switching-wavelength pulsed carrier in an interferometric wavelength converter configuration

Abstract

Multi-wavelength sampling of a 10 Gb/s optical label was demonstrated using cross phase modulation (XPM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) in conjunction with a switching-wavelength pulsed carrier. The optical label was parallel processed at 2.5 Gb/s and was successfully recovered. The carrier pulses were found to experience a modulation due to the optical label and the individual wavelength channels were filtered out and detected by an avalanche photo detector (PD) with a 2.5 GHz bandwidth. The results show that all channels experience a negative power penalty at a bit error rate (BER) of 10-9.