Abstract

Due to the growing popularity of optical superchannels and software-defined networking, reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) architectures for superchannel switching have recently attracted significant attention. ROADMs based on micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) and liquid crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) technologies are predominantly used. Motivated by requirements for low power, high-speed, small area footprint, and compact switching solutions, we propose and demonstrate spatial and wavelength flexible superchannel switching using monolithically integrated silicon photonics (SiP) micro-ring resonators (MRRs). We demonstrate the MRRs’ capabilities and potential to be used as a fundamental building block in ROADMs. Unicast and multicast switching operation of an entire superchannel is demonstrated after transmission over 50 km of standard single mode fiber. The performance of each sub-channel from the $120\mathrm{Gb}/\mathrm{s}$ QPSK Nyquist superchannel is analyzed, and degradation in error vector magnitude performance was observed for outer sub-channels due to the 3 dB bandwidth of the MRRs, which is comparable with the superchannel bandwidth. However, all sub-channels for all switching cases (unicast, multicast, and bi-directional operation) exhibit performance far below the 7% FEC limit. The switching time of the SiP MRR chip is such that high-capacity superchannel interconnects between users can be set up and reconfigured on the microsecond time scale.

© 2017 Optical Society of America

Software-defined control-plane for wavelength selective unicast and multicast of optical data in a silicon photonic platform

Alexander Gazman, Colm Browning, Meisam Bahadori, Ziyi Zhu, Payman Samadi, Sébastien Rumley, Vidak Vujicic, Liam P. Barry, and Keren Bergman
Opt. Express 25(1) 232-242 (2017)

Traffic Allocation Strategies in WSS-Based Dynamic Optical Networks

Ali Shakeri, Miquel Garrich, Anderson Bravalheri, Davide Careglio, Josep Solé-Pareta, and Andrea Fumagalli
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 9(4) B112-B123 (2017)

Beyond 100  Gb/s: Capacity, Flexibility, and Network Optimization [Invited]

Kim Roberts, Qunbi Zhuge, Inder Monga, Sebastien Gareau, and Charles Laperle
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 9(4) C12-C24 (2017)

Deep-Neural-Network-Based Wavelength Selection and Switching in ROADM Systems

Weiyang Mo, Craig L. Gutterman, Yao Li, Shengxiang Zhu, Gil Zussman, and Daniel C. Kilper
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 10(10) D1-D11 (2018)

Multicast Techniques for Hybrid RF/FSO DTNs

M. Atakora and H. Chenji
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 9(11) 1051-1061 (2017)