320 Gbit/s all-optical regeneration for OTDM signals

An all-optical regeneration has been carried out for the first time at 320 Gbit/s, exploiting the capabilities of a 3-stage NOLM-based regenerator. Q-factor improvement from 3.4 to 6.3 has been achieved. Introduction The development of high capacity optical transmission systems is finding limitations due to the signal distortions caused by fiber nonlinearities, chromatic dispersion and polarisation mode dispersion that affect high bit rate signals. Moreover, in amplified multi-span links, noise accumulation and timing jitter represent significant impairments. Therefore an in-line regeneration of the optical signal is necessary in order to increase the maximum transmission distance. For system bit rates higher than 40 Gbit/s the regeneration must be done in the optical domain [1]. The regeneration task appears to be arduous for increasing bit rates and only few regeneration schemes have been proposed up to now, for signal bit rates up to 160 Gbit/s [2,3]. In [3] we proposed a scheme of all-optical regenerator for OTDM (Optical Time Division Multiplexing) signals up to 160 Gbit/s, based on NOLMs (Nonlinear Optical Loop Mirrors). Here we demonstrate the suitability and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for higher bit rates, experimentally realizing – for the first time to our knowledge – the all-optical regeneration of a 320 Gbit/s OTDM signal. PC 1 km DSF 2 km DSF