An optical packet compressor based on a fiber delay loop

We propose an optical packet compressor based on a fiber delay loop and demonstrate its feasibility for an all optical inter-local area network (LAN) TDM network. The proposed scheme requires only a few devices for compression operation and only one delay line to obtain the desired compression ratio. The calculated optical signal-to-noise ratio of the compressed packet with 1-nm bandwidth is more than 20 dB when the number of the compressed bits is less than 100. Compression of 25-MHz 10-bit packet to 5 GHz is experimentally demonstrated.