TY - JOUR

T1 - Real-Time experimental demonstration of DSP-enabled soft-ROADMs with multi-level flexible add/drop functions for cloud access networks

AU - Al-Rawachy, Ehab

AU - Giddings, Roger

AU - Tang, Jianming

PY - 2019/1/7

Y1 - 2019/1/7

N2 - Abstract: Making use of digital filtering, drop RF signal-driven intensity modulation and passive optical coupling, DSP-enabled flexible ROADMs, termed soft-ROADMs, are experimentally demonstrated in real-time, which are free from both optical filters and O-E-O conversions and are inherently transparent to major network design characteristics. In a 4-channel IMDD optical network node incorporating FPGA-based orthogonal digital filter multiplexing, fully real-time soft-ROADM dynamic add and drop operations at both sub-wavelength and spectrally overlapped orthogonal sub-band levels are extensively, experimentally explored, along with their performance robustness against condition variations of practical networks associated with low-cost optical/electrical components. It is shown that the soft-ROADMs introduce optical power penalties as low as 1.4dB for add operation and 2dB for drop operation. For received optical powers fixed at -10dBm, the add operation can tolerate a differential optical input dynamic range of 6.5dB (1.5dB) for sub-wavelength (sub-band) add operation. On the other hand, robust drop operation performances are obtainable over a ~5dB (16°) drop RF signal amplitude (phase) variation range. This work is a significant milestone in demonstrating the technical feasibility of utilising soft-ROADMs to create a programmable networking environment capable of addressing elastic 5G slicing and the SDN paradigm

AB - Abstract: Making use of digital filtering, drop RF signal-driven intensity modulation and passive optical coupling, DSP-enabled flexible ROADMs, termed soft-ROADMs, are experimentally demonstrated in real-time, which are free from both optical filters and O-E-O conversions and are inherently transparent to major network design characteristics. In a 4-channel IMDD optical network node incorporating FPGA-based orthogonal digital filter multiplexing, fully real-time soft-ROADM dynamic add and drop operations at both sub-wavelength and spectrally overlapped orthogonal sub-band levels are extensively, experimentally explored, along with their performance robustness against condition variations of practical networks associated with low-cost optical/electrical components. It is shown that the soft-ROADMs introduce optical power penalties as low as 1.4dB for add operation and 2dB for drop operation. For received optical powers fixed at -10dBm, the add operation can tolerate a differential optical input dynamic range of 6.5dB (1.5dB) for sub-wavelength (sub-band) add operation. On the other hand, robust drop operation performances are obtainable over a ~5dB (16°) drop RF signal amplitude (phase) variation range. This work is a significant milestone in demonstrating the technical feasibility of utilising soft-ROADMs to create a programmable networking environment capable of addressing elastic 5G slicing and the SDN paradigm

U2 - 10.1364/OE.27.000016

DO - 10.1364/OE.27.000016

M3 - Article

VL - 27

SP - 16

EP - 33

JO - Optics Express

JF - Optics Express

SN - 1094-4087

IS - 1

ER -