Performance Comparison of Multi-wavelength Conversion Using SOA-MZI and DSF for Optical Wavelength Multicast

The electronic layer multicast is going to face the speed and capacity bottleneck of the future optical data networks. Transparent optical wavelength multicast by multi-wavelength conversion is an effective way of achieving data multicast in the optical domain without any optical-electronic-optical conversion. In this paper, two multiple wavelength conversion technologies for 10 Gb/s data rate are investigating and discussed. The first technology is based on cross-phase modulation in a semiconductor optical amplifier -- Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and the second is based on four-wave mixing in a dispersion-shifted fiber. We present the simulated performance comparison of two approaches obtained using VPItransmissionMaker™WDM simulator. Afterwards, we analyze these results in comparison with our previous experimental results of the same schemes.