Experimental Demonstration of Soft-ROADMs with Drop Signal Phase Independent Performance for PTMP 5G Fronthauls

A dual-arm IQ soft-ROADM drop element is demonstrated to dynamically and adaptively drop any IQ channel pair, from a single optical wavelength containing multiple sub-wavelengths, whilst maintaining an acceptable BER independent of drop RF signal phase offset. Such soft-ROADMs simplify the practical implementation of Point-to-Multipoint 5G fronthauls.