Novel scheme of header extraction based on SOA-MZI with asymmetric control light

An all optical header extraction scheme based on semiconductor optical amplifier and Mach-Zehnder-Interferometer (SOA-MZI) with asymmetric control light was proposed and demonstrated in this paper. By theoretical analysis, we found the proposed scheme can implement the optical?? header extraction more effectively. Numerical analysis and simulation show that more than 18dB contrast ratio of the extracted header at 20Gbit/s and the suppressed payload at 80Gbit/s can be achieved. In addition, the parameters of the SOA-MZI and the input packet are discussed to optimize the performance of the scheme and the results also indicate that the performance of the scheme is influenced greatly by the parameters of SOA.