All-Optical Aggregation and De-Aggregation of 4 x BPSK-16QAM Using Nonlinear Wave Mixing for Flexible Optical Network

A scheme is proposed for all-optical aggregation from four 10 Gbps binary-phase-shift-keying (BPSK) signals into one 40 Gbps 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) signal by applying the coherent addition of optical vectors, and de-aggregation for the 16QAM signal to recover the data of four original BPSK signals in high nonlinear fiber (HNLF) without information loss or redundancy using self-phase modulation (SPM) and four-wave mixing (FWM). The simulation results show that the error-vector-magnitude (EVM) curves of BPSK signal before aggregation and the 16QAM signal almost coincide with each other, as well as after the de-aggregation it has about 20% degradation at most. The bit error rate (BER) performance of BPSK signals indicates that when the OSNR of BPSK before aggregation is greater than 21.0 dB, then the wrong code of BPSK signal after de-aggregation can be corrected at the receiving end. Additionally, the expanded methods are also proposed for the aggregation of 8PSK signal and 64QAM signal by employing the similar principle. This proposed method provides a new way for realizing the flexible optical transmission and reception of advanced modulation format signals, and suits for the future dynamically reconfigurable optical network at the gateway nodes between different transmission networks.