High-Performance Optical 3R Regeneration for Scalable Fiber Transmission System Applications

This paper proposes and demonstrates optical 3R regeneration techniques for high-performance and scalable 10-Gb/s transmission systems. The 3R structures rely on monolithically integrated all-active semiconductor optical amplifier-based Mach-Zehnder interferometers (SOA-MZIs) for signal reshaping and optical narrowband filtering using a Fabry-Peacuterot filter (FPF) for all-optical clock recovery. The experimental results indicate very stable operation and superior cascadability of the proposed optical 3R structure, allowing error-free and low-penalty 10-Gb/s [pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) 2²³-1 ] return-to-zero (RZ) transmission through a record distance of 1 250 000 km using 10 000 optical 3R stages. Clock-enhancement techniques using a SOA-MZI are then proposed to accommodate the clock performance degradations that arise from dispersion uncompensated transmission. Leveraging such clock-enhancement techniques, we experimentally demonstrate error-free 125 000-km RZ dispersion uncompensated transmission at 10 Gb/s (PRBS 2²³-1) using 1000 stages of optical 3R regenerators spaced by 125-km large-effective-area fiber spans. To evaluate the proposed optical 3R structures in a relatively realistic environment and to investigate the tradeoff between the cascadability and the spacing of the optical 3R, a fiber recirculation loop is set up with 264- and 462-km deployed fiber. The field-trial experiment achieves error-free 10-Gb/s RZ transmission using PRBS 2²³-1 through 264 000-km deployed fiber across 1000 stages of optical 3R regenerators spaced by 264-km spans