Novel Pump-Switching FWM Scheme for Optical Superchannel Conversion in EON

Elastic optical networks (EONs) have caused great interest for their flexible allocation and efficient utilization of the spectral resource. In this letter, we investigate superchannel conversion in EON. Similar with conventional wavelength conversion in wavelength division multiplexing, superchannel conversion is transparent to the signal bit rate and modulation format. What is more, superchannel conversion should also support multi-band polarization division multiplexing (PDM) signal with wide tuning range to realize flexible bandwidth assignment. We propose a pump-switching four-wave-mixing scheme in highly nonlinear fiber to realize superchannel conversion and experimentally demonstrate it on a multi-band PDM orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) superchannel. A flexible conversion region that covers from 1530 to 1565 nm is achieved by the proposed scheme.