Photonic Provisioning Using a Packaged SOI Hybrid All-Optical Wavelength Converter in a Meshed Optical Network Testbed

We demonstrate path wavelength routing and switching using a packaged and pigtailed hybrid integrated silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonic circuit. The fabricated device incorporates a 1.25 mm nonlinear semiconductor optical amplifier mounted on the SOI board and two multimode interference-based cascaded delay interferometers monolithically integrated on the same SOI substrate. The photonic chip has a footprint of 384 mm
²
and performs all-optical wavelength conversion at ultrafast data rates. The packaged and pigtailed module is inserted and tested as a switching node in a meshed optical network testbed carrying real data traffic and encompassing a wavelength division multiplexing optical link. Optical path wavelength switching and routing is implemented by a generalized multiprotocol label switching control plane. We present 10 GbE video-streaming routing as well as 40 Gb/s wavelength switching employing the system integrated all-optical wavelength converter. Error-free transmission and different kind of end-to-end services (video distribution, audio conference, and video conference) have been successfully evaluated.