Photonic WDM Switches for Multi-Band Optical Networks

To meet the increasing demand of high capacity low cost and low power challenges of 6G distribution networks, exploiting multi-band optical fiber transmission (MBT) operation from O to L bands is an attractive solution to significantly improve the current optical network capacity. The main challenge for MBT is the lack of mature wideband network components. Especially, MBT optical add/drop multiplexers (MB-OADM) that dynamically route the wideband optical signals and network traffic are key network elements. In this work, we report the assessment of MB-OADM node for metro access and beyond 5G distribution networks. Experimental results show that the MB-OADM based network maintains high optical signal-to-noise ratio(OSNR) values up to 36dB in the C-band and 33 dB in the O-band over 100km across five nodes with 20 km link span in between (total 100 km) without additional optical amplifiers at 25 Gbps. BER results indicated that the architecture supports cascading through nine C -band nodes over 45 km with a 3.8 dB power penalty at 25 Gbps and through five O band nodes with a 2 dB penalty at 25 Gbps.