Challenges and Enabling Technologies for Multi-Band WDM Optical Networks

The ever increasing capacity demand on optical networks and the slowdown of improving spectral efficiency lead to the solution of utilizing more wavelength band in existing optical fibers. More and more operators will extend from C band to C+L bands, or plan to deploy C+L systems, and in future they may utilize more of other bands. This paper firstly discusses different optical layer architectures for multi-band system. Using optical components that can natively support multi-band is attractive to us, because in this way the multi-band system can be planned and operated similarly with the single-band system, which is customer friendly and potentially more economical. We address mainly three technical challenges in this paper. The first one is the wide-band fiber optical amplifier (OA). After a short review of recent research progress, we propose a hybrid erbium-doped fiber (EDF) and bismuth-doped fiber (BDF) based OA approach, and demonstrated single-stage amplification over 100 nm in extended C+L bands. The second challenge is the optical cross connect based on wavelength selective switch (WSS). It is not trivial to realize a C+L-band WSS while preventing the key optical parameters (filtering bandwidth, loss, channel isolation, etc.) to be degraded. We analyze different technical schemes, and propose an optical design based on an LCoS with a large panel size and a high-dispersion diffraction grating. The optical design and simulation on a 2x35 WSS reveals this approach can support 100-nm extended C+L spectrum and is promising for commercialization. The third challenge is the SRS induced WDM channel power inequality, which is more severe for multi-band system. We propose a solution by using OAs with a novel optical spectrum processor (OSP). Simulation and experiment showed that the power of the WDM channels can be equalized on a per span basis, which can prevent accumulation of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) induced wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) channel power transfer and can meanwhile keep the optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) of WDM channels well equalized.