Description
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a bidirectional optical add/drop multiplexer for single-fiber bidirectional optical networks. The new structure of the symmetric single-fiber bidirectional optical add/drop multiplexer (SBOADM) is composed of a multi-port optical circulator and fiber Bragg gratings. The new symmetric SBOADM can add or drop channels in both directions and has self-healing characteristics when constructed in a ring network. Furthermore, the insertion loss for the through and upstream signals is much lower than the power loss caused by a 1×2 optical splitter. In addition, the new symmetric SBOADM structure is entirely composed of passive components, which makes it cost effective.
The proposed new symmetric SBOADM can simultaneously address the trend of using wavelength division multiplexing to increase bandwidth in future optical networks. By incorporating this new symmetric SBOADM, the number of nodes in the transmission system can also be increased or decreased as needed. The experimental results show that the performance of the optical signal extraction, penetration, and upstream functions are all very ideal. The power of the optical signal and the eye diagram after extraction, penetration, and upstream are quite complete. The insertion loss of the penetrating optical signal and the upstream optical signal are approximately 2.12 and 1.9 dB, respectively. These values are much smaller than the value caused by a 1×2 optical splitter. The insertion loss of the extracted optical signal power is roughly equal to that of a 1×2 optical splitter. Overall, the intended functionality of the proposed new symmetric SBOADM architecture and its excellent performance have been verified.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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