All-optical add-drop of an OTDM channel using an ultra-fast fiber based wavelength converter

In conclusion we have demonstrated an all-optical OTDM add-drop multiplexer based on an ultra-fast fiber wavelength converter. A 10 Gb/s data channel is stripped from an incoming 40 Gb/s OTDM signal and a new 10 Gb/s data channel is added in its place and transmitted through 50 km of DSF. A maximum power penalty of 1 dB was obtained between the back-to-back and the worst through going channel. The system is robust to environmental disturbances and the transmitted channels performed well under transmission conditions. A clock-recovery unit can be integrated in the system to achieve synchronization between the incoming data stream and the local drop and through clocks. There is a polarization dependence of about 1 dB in the wavelength converter, however it can be made polarization independent as shown in. This technique can be scaled to very high bit-rates. Using highly non-linear fiber of appropriate dispersion value can increase the bandwidth of conversion to cover the entire C band and also reduce the power requirement.