Design and testing of an optical routing device with reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer and interleaver functions

Abstract

A multifunction all-optical routing device for a dynamic network is presented. The proposed routing device consists of two arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs), 12 optical circulators, and six tunable fiber Bragg gratings (TFBGs) to realize the functions of all-optical multichannel reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) and optical wavelength interleaver. The AWGs have the characteristics of wavelength cycling of light. So even if there is no additional optical architecture in the proposed optical device, it can have the function of an optical interleaver. Both ROADM and optical interleaver are the keys to enable the modern optical communication services and support the remote configuration of optical paths and the reconfiguration of network topologies. The experimental data show that the functions of add/drop and wavelength interleaver can be implemented. Three dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) channels are used to evaluate the performance of ROADM of the proposed routing device. The results of this study demonstrated the feasibility of this routing device for the DWDM networks.