All-optical multicasting based on multi-pumpfour-wave mixing in photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

All-optical multicasting is a key technology of future transparent photonic network, and in this paper it is presented and experimentally demonstrated based on four-wave mixing (FWM) with multi-frequency pump in 100 m dispersion flattened highly nonlinear photon crystal fiber (HNL-PCF). A signal together with double orthogonal pumps is input into the PCF, and four idlers at new frequencies can be generated through degenerate multi-frequency pump FWM processes, which carry the same data information as the input signal and then a 4×10 Gbit/s wavelength multicasting has been obtained with a tunable operation wavelength range of 35.2 nm and total channel span of 4.4THz. The optimal conversion efficiency and the optimal Q factor are -22 dB and 5.3, respectively. The system is transparent to both bit rate and modulation format. The advantage of this scheme consists in the ability of bandwidth, and the multicasting channel scalable due to dispersion flattening of PCF is used. Furthermore, it is all optical fiber, compact and robust, which makes it more competitive as well as easily accessible for the uses in practical optical communication systems.