Optical modulation format conversion from one QPSK to one BPSK with information-integrity-employing phase-sensitive amplifier.

Abstract

In this paper, a scheme for optical modulation format conversion from one 20Gbps quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signal to one 20Gbps binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signal with information integrity is proposed and verified by simulation. The theory of degenerate phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) employed as a phase de-multiplexer is derived in detail and used to decompose the in- (I) and quadrature- (Q) phase components of QPSK. Then the I and Q components are parallel-to-series converted into one BPSK. The constellations show that the phase noise of the original signal is effectively restrained by the conversion system through use of the PSA. The error vector magnitude and bit-error rate (BER) of the QPSK, converted BPSK, and a back-to-back BPSK are measured and compared with each other. We find that the BER performance of the converted BPSK is better than QPSK and maintains the original information integrity with different input signal quality. Some potential issues are also discussed as to practical implementation of the scheme. This modulation-format-conversion scheme has potential applications in improving the signal BER performance and flexible transmitters and receivers in software-defined networks.