Abstract
The rapidly increase in demand for bandwidth from end-users forces network infrastructure to be agile and flexible. Expansion of WDM channels results in increase of the complexity of optical cross-connect. The grouping of wavelengths, that is, layered structure of optical path, is a way to reduce this complexity. Accordingly, hierarchical hybrid OTDM/WDM networks, as shown in Fig. 1, have been proposed as future core networks.1 After grouping WDM channels as wavelength-band, the high-level traffic should be converted to terabit/s OTDM, which is cut through the low-level nodes with guarantee for error-free transmission using a single optical carrier signal monitoring. The hierarchical structure suggests a natural method of using wavelength-band routing to achieve a high degree of spectrum reuse. In such networks, wavelength-band conversions and multiplexing format conversions will be key technologies. We have demonstrated bi-directional multiplexing format conversions between OTDM and WDM.2 And Watanabe et al. have demonstrated inter-wavelength-band conversions of 32 WDM × 10 Gbit/s.3 However, ultimate performance of OTDM signal wavelength conversion still remains to be pursued.
© 2002 Optical Society of America
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