Optical Network Node Supporting One-to-Six WDM Multicasting of QPSK Signals

The capability of multicast directly in the optical domain at the routing nodes is a target for energy saving, fast service provisioning, and effective network resource utilization. An optical network node architecture supporting wavelength conversion, unicast, and multicast is presented and a shared multicast/wavelength conversion module is designed in the intermediate node. Wavelength conversion and one-to-six WDM multicast of 25-Gb/s QPSK signals based on four-wave mixing are experimentally demonstrated using a semiconductor optical amplifier with only two pumps. All six multicast signals achieve error-free performance with a power penalty <;4.3 dB.