All-Optical Wavelength Preserved Modulation Format Conversion From PDM-QPSK to PDM-BPSK Using FWM and Interference

Flexible conversion between multilevel modulation formats is one of the key processing functions to realize adaptive modulation techniques for flexible networking aimed at high spectral efficiency in optical fiber transmission. The authors have proposed an all-optical format conversion system from binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) to quadrature PSK (QPSK) and its reverse conversion from QPSK to BPSK. The latter had an advantage of wavelength-shift-free conversion from an incident QPSK to simultaneous two BPSK outputs without loss of the transmitting data. However, it was limited only for a single polarization signal. In this paper, we propose a novel method of wavelength-preserved conversion for polarization division multiplexed QPSK signal with arbitrary polarization rotation angle to the x-axis on the x-y polarization plane which is orthogonal to the propagation axis. The method is based on the orthogonal dual-pump four-wave-mixing (FWM) in the highly nonlinear fiber with a nonlinear optical loop mirror configuration, which has advantages that it separately outputs the original signal and the phase conjugate signal and has independent FWM efficiency of the signal polarization angle. We show the system performances such as bit-error-rate and optical signal-to-noise ratio penalty evaluated by numerical simulations.