Experimental demonstration of cascaded AWG access network featuring bi-directional transmission and polarization multiplexing.

We present the first experimental demonstration of a bidirectional cascaded arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) access network combining one NxN AWG in the central office with multiple 1xN AWG's at the distribution points, such as to individually address N(2) users with only N wavelengths. Downstream and upstream data share the same optical path. BER curves were measured using 2.5Gb/s data stream in each direction, and error free transmission achieved for downstream and upstream, with only 0.3dB power penalty for simultaneous transmission. The addition of two orthogonal polarization-multiplexed channels per wavelength doubled the number of possible end users. Error free transmission was achieved with simultaneous upstream and downstream transmission of a composite signal featuring eight 2.5Gb/s channels (2 polarizations x 4 wavelengths).