Partially reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers for dense WDM networks

摘要

We propose a new partially reconfigurable add-drop multiplexer (OADM) that allows dropping several fixed wavelength channels and at least one tunable wavelength channel. It consists of fixed and tunable fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) and optical circulators (OCs). By properly assigning wavelengths to signals that are added/dropped at an OADM node, the requirement for tuning range of tunable FBGs could be made as small as the wavelength spacing of dense WDM channels. The proposed OADM has potentially low insertion loss for through-channels compared with other tunable OADMs. Operation and performance of this OADM are experimentally investigated.