Interferometric crosstalk suppression using polarization multiplexing technique and an SOA

Summary form only given.Interferometric crosstalk is one of the biggest issues in transparent wavelength-division-multiplexing networks, and should be overcome by either decreasing the crosstalk level from the components, or employing effective techniques to suppress its impact. We use a gain-saturated semiconductor optical amplifier to suppress the impact of interferometric crosstalk, and show that 6 dB more crosstalk can be tolerated for 1 dB penalty at 10 Gbit/s. Using polarization multiplexing of optical signals modulated by data and the complementary, impairments such as waveform distortion and extinction ratio degradation are eliminated, and the method is also bit rate transparent.