A ROF system based on 18-tuple frequency millimeter wave generation using external modulator and SOA

Four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) has several important features, such as, high speed and high FWM conversion efficiency as well as optical demultiplexing (DEMUX) (Mecozzi et al., 1995; Mecozzi & Mrk, 1997; Das et al., 2000). The are several applications of FWM in SOAs for all-optical devices, such as, wavelength converters (Vahala et al., 1996), optical samplers (Inoue & Kawaguchi, 1998), optical phase conjugators (Kikuchi & Matsumura, 1998) and optical multiplexers/demultiplexers (Kawanishi et al., 1997; Kawanishi et al., 1994; Morioka et al., 1996; Uchiyama et al., 1998; Tomkos et al., 1999; Kirita et al., 1998; Buxens et al., 2000) have been demonstrated for optical communication systems. When a pulse of a time-multiplexed signal train (for example, a probe pulse) and a pump pulse are injected simultaneously into an SOA, gain and refractive index in the SOA are modulated and an FWM signal is generated by the modulations. Thus, we can obtain a demultiplexed signal as an FWM signal at the output of SOA. All-optical demultiplexing has been experimentally demonstrated up to 200 Gbit/s (Morioka et al., 1996). Tomkos et al., (Tomkos et al., 1999) suggested a number of ways to improve the performance of the dual-pump demultiplexer at 40 Gbit/s as follows; adjustment of the input wavelengths at the peak gain wavelength of the SOA under saturation conditions, the use of higher pump power at the input of the device, or/and the use of pulsed pumps with short pulsewidths. For the higher bit-rate, the overlap of the input to the FWM signal pulses may appear both in the time and spectral domain. The pattern effect may also appear in the FWM signal due to the slow components of the optical nonlinearities in SOAs (Saleh & Habbab, 1990). These effects degrade the usefulness of the FWM in SOAs as a practical DEMUX device in optical network/ communication systems. Therefore, it is very important to analysis the optical DEMUX characteristics based on FWM in SOAs for the ultrafast multi-bit input optical pulses.

In this paper, we study nonlinear effects in the optical communication fibers such as four wave mixing (FWM) in an integration of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) with radio over fiber (ROF). We used an optical double side band (ODSB) configuration with direct and external modulation using dual drive Mach–Zehnder modulator. A 16-DWDM-ROF link at different data rates is used for information transmission in single mode fiber. Also, the performance analysis of the proposed system under FWM effect with different parameters such as data rate, channel spacing, input power, fiber length and optical amplifier gain is presented. The results of the proposed system are evaluated based on bit error rate (BER) and maximum quality factor (Q). Results show that the external DSB modulation format has better performance rather than the direct modulation. Generally, for 10 dB input power, 100 GHz channel spacing, 10 Gbps bit rate and 20 km link, the Q is about 20 and BER is less than 10−84 for external ODSB modulation format. Also it has been shown that with increasing data transfer rates, output results such as optical signal-to-noise ratio, BER and Q are deteriorated under influence of FWM-effect.

In this paper, we propose a cost-efficient, polarization-insensitive and widely-tunable wavelength conversion scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). In this scheme, electrical OFDM signal directly drives directly modulated laser (DML) to achieve intensity modulation, then the modulated signal lightwave and pump are coupled and injected into a polarization-diversity structure for performing FWM in SOA. The analytical results show that the proposed scheme is polarization-insensitive and has a wider conversion range compared with the parallel pump scheme and orthogonal pump scheme. We have also numerically demonstrated wavelength conversion of 16QAM-OFDM signal by employing the proposed scheme. The results can be agreed with the theoretical analyses. In addition, the impact of input optical power, line-width of external cavity laser (ECL) and injection current of SOA on the system performance are also studied.

This paper investigates bidirectional transmission using four wave mixing (FWM) for wavelength division multiplex passive optical network (WDM-PON) applications. A semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is considered to generate FWM. A use of FWM makes it possible to convert a downstream data wavelength to a different wavelength, which is used for upstream transmission. The wavelength generated by FWM can realize bidirectional transmission with a single fiber. We assume intensity modulation (IM) for both up- and down-transmission. Both an injection locked Fabry-Perot laser diode (FP-LD) transmitter and a transmitter with an external modulator are considered for upstream transmission. In both cases, an extinction ratio (Ex) of downstream signal light is very important for both sending and receiving properties and the Ex influences the bit error rate (BER) property. This paper clarifies the relationship between the Ex of FWM and the power penalty ΔP. This paper also clarify the Ex value of FWM as a function of input signal Ex using a model SOA theoretically. Fundamental transmission experiments, 10 Gbit/s downstream and 2.5 Gbit/ s upstream, using both types of transmitters confirmed the possibilities of the bidirectional transmission using FWM.

We investigate the phase-preserving amplitude regenerative characteristics of the return-to-zero (RZ) differential-phase-shift-keying (DPSK) wavelength conversion based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The Q-factor and the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) before and after conversion are experimentally obtained and analysed in different input noise power levels. In both the continuous-wave and synchronous clock pumping cases, we find that there is amplitude clamping in the FWM conversion due to the gain saturation of SOA, which can suppress the amplitude fluctuation of the converted DPSK signal before and after demodulation. We have achieved 2-dB Q penalty improvement in our experiment demonstration of 10Gbit/s RZ-DPSK signal with OSNR lower than 19dB.

We study and experimentally validate the vector theory of four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA). We use the vector theory of FWM to design a polarization insensitive all-optical wavelength converter, suitable for advanced modulation formats, using non-degenerate FWM in SOAs and parallelly polarized pumps. We demonstrate the wavelength conversion of polarization-multiplexed (PM)-QPSK, PM-16QAM and a Nyquist WDM super-channel modulated with PM-QPSK signals at a baud rate of 12.5 GBaud, with total data rates of 50 Gbps, 100 Gbps and 200 Gbps respectively.

Future optical networks may require both wavelength conversion and bit shape regeneration in an all-optical domain. The possibility of pulse reshaping while providing wavelength conversion may support new demands over medium and large distances links (Kelly, 2001). Indeed, during propagation the optical data signal suffers deterioration due to the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) from optical amplifiers, pulse distortion from intrinsic dispersion, crosstalk, and attenuation. All-optical regenerators may be important components for the restoration of these signals, providing complexity and cost reductions with the avoidance of optoelectronic conversions. The regeneration could be 2R (reamplification and reshaping) or 3R, which also provide retiming to solve jitter (Simon et al., 2008). Several 3R regenerators using the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) have been proposed, such as cascaded SOAs setups (Funabashi et al., 2006) or SOA based MachZehnder interferometers (MZI) (Fischer et al., 1999). However for small and medium distances systems, where the signal amplitude noise and distortions form the main problem and where jitter has fewer magnitudes, the simpler 2R processes can be adequate to keep signal quality (Simon et al., 1998). In addition, the SOA is a helpful device for both 2R-regeneration (Ohman et al., 2003) and wavelength conversion (Durhuus et al., 1996). Several techniques for 2R-regeneration based on SOAs have been proposed and tested, for example by using four-wave mixing (FWM) (Simos et al., 2004), cross-gain modulation (XGM) (Contestabile et al., 2005), integration within MZI (Wang et al., 2007), multimode interferometric SOA (Merlier et al., 2001), cross-phase modulation (XPM) with filtering (Chayet et al., 2004), and feed forward technique (Conforti et al., 1999). However, these techniques require complex designs and involve critical operation points, even the simplest ones based on XGM features. In addition, most of these techniques are not capable of wavelength conversion and regeneration simultaneously. Recently a regenerator based on cross-gain modulation was proposed using one SOA for wavelength conversion (in a counter-propagating mode) and another deeply saturated SOA (synchronized by an optical delay line) to achieve cross-gain compression (Contestabile 2005). This efficient approach has similarities with the all-optical feed-forward techniques. In addition, this regenerator could not done wavelength conversion if the wavelength of the

We have proposed a scheme of radio-over-fiber (RoF) system employing a dual-parallel Mach–Zehnder modulator (DP-MZM) based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). In this scheme, the pump and the signal are generated by properly adjusting the direct current bias, modulation index of the DP-MZM, and the phase difference between the sub-MZMs. Because of the pump and the signal deriving from the same optical wave, the polarization states of the two lightwaves are copolarized. The single-pump FWM is polarization insensitive. After FWM and optical filtering, the optical millimeter-wave with octuple frequency is generated. About 40-GHz RoF system with a 2.5-Gbit / s signal is implemented by numerical simulation; the result shows that it has a good performance after the signal is transmitted over 40-km single-mode fiber. Then, the effects of the SOA’s injection current and the carrier-to-sideband ratio on the system performance are discussed by simulation, and the optimum value for the system is obtained.

A reconfigurable and wideband photonic method is proposed for microwave photonic harmonic down-conversion based on cascaded four-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The cascaded four-wave mixing in SOA triggers high-order harmonics generation of local oscillator (LO) in the optical domain, and enables microwave down-conversion in the electrical domain with a low-frequency electrical LO. Compared with the conventional photonic method, ours allows microwave down-conversion operation for wide frequency range RF signal with a low-frequency electrical LO, and at the same time it avoids the requirement of complex phase control and heavy driving for the electrical LO. Moreover, it enables reconfigurable down-conversion with frequency tunability. In the demonstration, the 3~40 GHz RF signals are experimentally down-converted to IF signals below 2 GHz with a low-frequency electrical LO within the range of 5 GHz.

Linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) are essential components of communications systems such as pseudo random bit sequence (PRBS) generators, convolutional encoders, scramblers and randomizers [1, 2]. Fig.1 (left) shows a LFSR scheme in which the XOR gate is operated among two tapped bits i and i+k within the shift register. The result bit is fed to the shift register at the last position (n) and the sequence in the register is 1-bit shifted as well. The experimental setup for demonstrating an all-optical LFSR is shown in Fig.1 (middle). The main components of the scheme are an optical buffer [3], a bit selecting circuit, and a XOR gate. The data vector (A) is generated by modulating the continuous wave (CW) λ s with a 10Gbps non-return-to-zero (NRZ) electrical pattern whose period is T P =33.3168µs. Only 5 bits are used as the initial sequence for the shift register. The travelling time of the packet in the buffer is T L =1.85 µs, meaning that up to 18 round trips can be accommodated by the pattern's period T P but one of those should be preserved for erasing the buffer before it is fetched a new sequence. The initial sequence enters the buffer as well as propagates directly to the bit selecting circuit. Every round trip, a new sequence as a replica of the previous one plus the feedback bit comes out. At the last round trip, a pump signal inserted into the buffer through the circulator will strongly reduce the gain of the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Both the circulating packet and the accumulating in-band amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise will be suppressed. The buffer is now completely cleaned for a new cycle. The first and the last bits of the 1-bit shifted sequence are selected for the XOR operation. Referring to Fig.1 (left), i=1 and k=4, n=5. With this setup, the bit selecting circuit requires 2 clock signals (C) for tap the proper bits from the incoming sequence. The sampling process is done by exploiting four-wave-mixing (FWM) in a 250m-long highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). Since at every round trip the sequence must be 1-bit shifted, the sampling clocks must be accordingly delayed for 1 bit, resulting the clock period of T C =T L +T B where T B =100ps is the bit time. The outputs of the bit selecting circuit are fed as pump signals to port a and d of a SOA Mach Zehnder interferometer (MZI). They are synchronized with a clock at λ s used as the probe signal (F) at port b. The output of the XOR gate is then fed back into the buffer. The feedback bit should be precisely allocated at the end of the packet circulating inside the buffer, meaning that the feedback time should be T F =T L +T B +T seq in which T seq is the original sequence duration and equal to 500ps in our setup. Fig.1 (right) depicts the results at the 10th round trip for two different input initial sequences (10001) and (10011) taken at point (B). The equalization between bits in the sequence and the quality of the pulses is strongly limited by the accumulating ASE noise inside the buffer, the long fiber-based structure and the bit's polarization. The fiber-based setup also causes misalignment between the clocks, spoils the essential synchronism and degrades the performance of the FWM and the XOR operation. One possible solution for solving all of these problems and hence improving the performance is the integration approach. The bit selection could be implemented exploiting nonlinear effects into an SOA or a periodic-poled lithium niobate (PPLN) instead of using a long HLNF. Moreover the extinction ratio of the pulses at the SOA-MZI XOR output (<13.5dB) could be improved, e.g. with a saturable absorber at its output, thus increasing the number of allowed round trips into the shift register and reducing the noise on the final bit sequence.

A novel method to generate ultra-wideband (UWB) signals based on two differential group delay modules and one Mach-Zehnder Modulator is proposed. Both simulation and experiments verified that the method could generate two kinds of UWB monocycles using low bit-rate non-return-to-zero data source (1Gbps). The monocycles have a fractional bandwidth of 127% at centre frequency 5.5GHz. Keywords: Ultra wideband (UWB), radio-over-fiber (RoF), differential group delay (DGD) 1. INTRODUCTION Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a fast emerging technology for short-range broadband wireless communication such as wireless personal area network and sensor network, etc. The UWB signal occupies wide bandwidth and has low power density, and it has immunity to multi-path fading [1]. As a carrier-free modulation scheme, direct-sequence impulse radio is more cost-effective and simpler compared with multi-band orthogonal frequency scheme. Since UWB is a room-scaled short range wireless communication technique, the wireless networks can operate mainly in indoor environment in standa lone mode. Considering the integration of UWB access networks and fixed wired networks, the combination of UWB-over-fiber technology and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology is a competitive candidate for future wideband access networks [2]. So many all-optical schemes that fit for UWB-over-fiber technology to generate and distribute UWB impulses have been reported recently. Zeng et al. proposed two approaches to generate UWB impulses using one phase modulator (PM), and 25-km single mode fiber (SMF) or FBG to convert phase-modulated light to UWB pulses [3, 4]. Wang and Dong proposed UWB signal generation using cross-gain modulation or cross-phase modulation in semiconductor optical amplifier [5, 6], which requires two laser sources and may increase the system complexity. Chen proposed a scheme based on optical polarization time delay [7]. It is a simple method, but the elect rical signal source needs at least twice bit-rate compared to the carried data. Most of the schemes n eed an electrical Gaussian pulse source, which is comm only composed of a high-speed pulse pattern generator (PPG). This is an expensive construction, for which the PPG should work at least 10 Gbps. Furthermore, if data are carried on the UWB pulses, another modulator should be added to the systems, which increase the system cost and complexity. In this paper, we proposed and experimentally demonstrated a simple method to generate data-carried UWB monocycle pulses based on two differential group delay (DGD) modules and one Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM). Instead of the data pattern “1000 0000 ”, which has one “1” followed by several “0”s to form the UWB signal, we use electrical non-return-to-zero (NRZ) data. The NRZ data modulate the optical signal in MZM to get an optical binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signal, which is then fed into two cascade DGD module s while the polarization of the light is carefully adjusted

A label swapping scheme of an optical labeled signal with differential phase shift keying (DPSK) for label at 2.5 Gb/s and pulse position modulation (PPM) for payload at 40 Gb/s is demonstrated by simulation. Power penalties of ?1.8 and ?0.8 dB are achieved for both the payload and label over 80-km single mode fiber (SMF) transmission. This labeling scheme allows the use of four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) to perform label erasure, with advantages of transparence for bit rate, high processing rate, simple architecture, and low cost. Label swapping is demonstrated with appropriate penalties of ?3.5 and 0.8 dB for PPM payload and new DPSK label, respectively. To further prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, label swapping in the case of using 10-Gb/s DPSK label is also investigated with the power penalties of 6 and 2 dB for PPM payload and new DPSK label.

Development of modern optical fiber networks puts an increasing demand on the optical hardware. All-optical signal processing components enable the highest switching rates and allow all-optical regeneration of pulse streams without converting the optical signal into electrical current. The subject of our research is self-switching in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and its applications in optical telecommunication networks. In this device, light injected in one of the input ports is unequally distributed over the two interferometer arms. Due to the intensity dependent refractive index in the interferometer arms, there can be a nonlinear phase shift induced between the optical signals of unequal intensities. The two signals therefore interfere destructively or constructively depending on the input power: in this way we obtain nonlinear self-switching. Two mechanisms of nonlinear phase shifting were considered: active, based on semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), and passive, based on quantum dots (QDs). Interferometers of two types were developed: 2-to-2 (two input ports and two output ports) and 2-to-1 (two input ports and one output port). The 2-to-2 SOA-MZIs based on self-switching have been investigated for two applications. One of them is the pattern effect compensator. If SOAs are employed for all-optical signal amplification, e.g. in optical access networks, an unwanted pulse distortion (known also as the pattern effect) takes place, as a result of the SOA gain saturation. Our component allows pattern-free amplification of the optical signals at bitrates up to 20 Gb/s. At 10 Gb/s it shows an extended input power range (up to 7 dB improvement) and comparable gain, which makes it suitable to be used as an optical amplifier. Another application of the 2-to-2 SOA-MZI is a 2R-regenerator. Optical amplifiers used in long distance optical links add noise to the optical signal, causing signal degradation. The signal can be regenerated by passing it through an optical gate with a nonlinear transfer function. The 2-to-2 SOA-MZI has such a nonlinear transfer function. The regeneration capabilities were demonstrated at 2.5 Gb/s by an improvement of the receiver sensitivity of about 2.5 dB. The dynamic characterization of the chips was carried out in a close cooperation with the research group COM at the Technical University of Denmark within the ePIXnet "network of excellence". The 2-to-1 MZI based on self-switching can be used as a low-loss optical combiner. An essential function in optical fiber networks is the combining of optical signals. A serious disadvantage of the conventional type of combiners used in the networks is that they let only half of the power (3 dB) through. In order to compensate for this loss, passive optical combiners are often used in combination with an in-line SOA. The first realization of the low-loss optical combiner uses SOAs as active phase shifters. Such an active low-loss combiner shows an improvement of transmission of over 2 dB compared to a conventional combiner with an in-line SOA. It is therefore expected that the output optical signal-to-noise ratio of the self-switching SOA-MZI is more than 2 dB better than that of a conventional combiner with an in-line SOA. While for the pattern effect compensator and the 2R-regenerator SOAs are used not only for inducing the nonlinear phase shift, but also for sufficient amplification, for the low-loss optical combiner the preferred nonlinear effects should be passive: combination of the signal is a passive function. Therefore, the second realization is based on a novel material, quantum dots. QDs provide improved all-optical nonlinearities resulting in a very small switching energy and large refractive index changes. Such a passive 2-to-1 QD-MZI based on self-switching showed an improvement up to 1.7 dB with respect to a conventional combiner. These improvements have a huge effect on e.g. the power budget in passive optical networks, where a large number of splitting stages are required. The Mach-Zehnder interferometers were realized in the InP/InGaAsP semiconductor material system, which is perfectly suitable for the integration of the photonic integrated circuits for the telecommunication applications. In order to realize both active components (such as e.g. SOAs) and passive components (such as e.g. waveguides, couplers), an active-passive integration technique was applied. This integration was realized in a close cooperation between JDS Uniphase Eindhoven and the COBRA Research Institute. It employs a three-step metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy regrowth process. The quantum dot material was grown within the COBRA Research Institute. Our MZIs use a ridge waveguide design, for which a reactive ion etching process was developed in the COBRA cleanroom. As a result of photonic integration our integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometers have very small dimensions: less than a square millimeter.

Photonic generation of UWB impulses by using a Fabry–Pérot semiconductor optical amplifier

A detailed analysis of the efficiency of four-wave mixing (FWM) is performed for a closely spaced energy state quantum dash semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The analysis takes into account the effect of all discrete energy states, the gain dispersion of the quantum dash, and the effect of doping on the FWM characteristics. Our analysis reveals that large FWM efficiency can be obtained when the energy of the pump signal is equal to the first excited state. We find that at low-applied current doping the dashes by p -type concentration enhances the FWM efficiency. While at high applied current, we find that doping the SOA with p -type concentration slightly enhances the FWM efficiency of the ground state and the first excited state and lowers the FWM efficiency of the higher excited states. Also we find that doping the dashes by n -type concentration slightly modifies the FWM efficiency spectrum.