Experimental demonstration of sixteen- channel bidirectional cross-connect transmission

摘要

The authors propose a multiwavelength bidirectional optical crossconnect (B-OXC) structure based on 1x16 multiplexer/demultiplexer (MUX/DMUX) and 2x2 optical switches. The 2x2 B-OXC system is implemented using one pair of array waveguide grating (AWG) based MUX/DMUX and all channels can be cross-connect independently in either direction. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the bidirectional WDM add/drop multiplexer is experimentally studied for a data rate of 2.5 Gb/s per channel, providing an overall capacity of 40 Gbit/s (2.5 Gb/s x 16 chs) in a 400 Km transmission. The worst channel crosstalk level is -37 dB and the typical switching time is 10 ms. We found that the performance of the B-OXC signals is only 1.0 dB degraded by a backward propagating signal.