Improved Performance Robustness of DSP-Enabled Flexible ROADMs Free from Optical Filters and O-E-O Conversions

Utilizing Hilbert-pair-based digital filtering, intensity modulation, and passive optical coupling, digital signal processing (DSP) enabled flexible reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) are reported, which are free from optical filters and optical-electrical-optical (O-E-O) conversions and offer excellent flexibility, colorlessness, gridlessness, contentionlessness, adaptability, and transparency to physical-layer network characteristics. In this paper, the ROADM performance robustness against variations in numerous network design aspects is, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, extensively explored in intensity-modulation- and direct-detection-based optical network nodes. Numerical results show that DSPs not only enable the ROADMs to dynamically and flexibly perform add/drop operations at wavelength, subwavelength, and spectrally overlapped orthogonal subband levels but also considerably improve the ROADM performance robustness against variations in modulation formats, transmission system characteristics/impairments, and terminal equipment configurations.