Wavelength Conversion Based Colorless Optical Transmitter for Upstream DWDM PON

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed a novel colorless optical transmitter based on all-optical wavelength conversion using a reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) for upstream transmission in dense wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical networks. The proposed colorless optical transmitter for the optical network unit is composed of an electro-absorption modulated laser (EML), an optical coupler, and an RSOA. The proposed upstream optical transmitter is based on the fast gain recovery of the RSOA governed by carrier-carrier scattering and carrier-phonon interactions. Thus, it can potentially operate at >10 Gb/s. Two separate wavelength bands are allocated, one for the pump signals and the other for the probe signals. Therefore, the proposed transmitter operates in a colorless manner since the EML can have any arbitrary wavelength within the pump band. We demonstrate the transmission of a 10.7-Gb/s upstream signal generated by the proposed scheme in a single-fiber loop back-configured network.