All-optical aggregation and de-aggregation between OOK, QPSK and 8QAM signals based on nonlinear effects

Abstract

An all-optical aggregation and de-aggregation scheme between on–off keying (OOK) signals, quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signals and 8-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (8QAM) signals is proposed and numerically simulated based on nonlinear effects in the high nonlinear fiber (HNLF). In the de-aggregation processing, the input 30 Gbit/s 8QAM signal is firstly de-aggregated into one 20 Gbit/s QPSK signal and one 10 Gbit/s binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signal by deploying self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM), four-wave mixing (FWM) and parameter amplification (PA) effects. One continuous optical carrier can be extracted from the converted BPSK signal by designing a feed-forward based modulation stripping configuration. The converted OOK signal can be obtained through vector superposition between the extracted optical carrier and the converted BPSK signal. In the aggregation processing, the converted 20 Gbit/s QPSK signal and the 10 Gbit/s OOK signal are fed to another HNLF and aggregated into one 30 Gbit/s 8QAM signal again by utilizing XPM and PA effects. Moreover, the aggregated 8QAM signal keeps the same wavelength and information integrity as the input 8QAM signal. the Error vector magnitude (EVM) and the bit error ratio (BER) for the 8QAM signal before and after aggregation and de-aggregation are measured to evaluate the scheme performance. The proposed all-optical aggregation and de-aggregation scheme for the advanced and simple modulation formats can be applied at the intermediate network node (INN) to solve the network traffic aggregation and de-aggregation with different modulation formats.