Simultaneous all-optical channel aggregation and de-aggregation based on nonlinear effects for OOK and MPSK formats in elastic optical networking

An all-optical channel aggregation from two lower bit rate OOK and MPSK to a higher bit rate 2M-ary PSK signal based on cross phase modulation (XPM) effect and corresponding de-aggregation to recover the two original signals by phase sensitive amplification (PSA) are proposed and demonstrated aimed to improve efficient use of the fiber and transponder resources in elastic optical networking (EON). Moreover, for the PSA-based de-aggregation scheme, a black-box device to extract the phase locked pump is also designed to realize the desired phase-locking relationship for practical application. Both 20-Gbps aggregated QPSK signal (M=2) and 30-Gbps aggregated 8PSK signal (M=4) as examples are studied respectively. The feasibility and tunability of the scheme have been confirmed by the input-output constellations and waveforms. The phase noise (PN) of recovered B/QPSK signal and amplitude standard deviation (ASD) of recovered OOK signal over the varying optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of the Q/8PSK signal affected by the link noise are studied and analyzed. Based on the same link noise environment, the two system bit-error rate (BER) performance are also investigated and the corresponding OSNRs for error-free signal recovery are given respectively. Finally, some potential application scenarios are discussed based on the same setup.