Regenerative Optical Buffer Based on SOA-Amplified Recirculating Loop

We introduce a novel scheme for all-optical buffering based on a recirculating fiber loop with regenerative amplification by cross-gain compression in a semiconductor optical amplifier. Fifty circulations of 10-Gb/s packets with 1.2-dB power penalty every 10 rounds are reported obtaining more than 150-μs buffering time. A large resilience of the scheme to noisy signals is also demonstrated.