Pulse Reshaping Capabilities of All-Optical Interferometric Wavelength Converters

Future high capacity WDM-networks are expected to utilise wavelength converters [1]. It has previously been shown, that wavelength converters efficiently can be implemented as interferometric wavelength converters (IWC’s) based on SOA’s [2-5]. Since a signal path is likely to include more than one IWC, the cascadability of the converters is essential. Here we show experimentally, that two converters operating at a bit rate of 10 Gbit/s and interconnected by 85 km of standard non-dispersion shifted (NDS) single mode fiber can be cascaded with no signal degradation, indicating a pulse reshaping capability of the IWC’s. It is shown by modelling that the interaction between fiberdispersion, chirp of the IWC’s and the signal reshaping of the converters can act the same way as a regenerated system and hence preserve signal quality over 175 km of NDS fiber at 10 Gbit/s