Experimental demonstration of penalty-free optical cross-connect cascade with multiwavelength transmission over 1000-km standard fiber

An optical cross-connect (OXC) architecture was proposed to implement high-capacity transparent wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical transport networks. A laboratory demonstrator was built to assess the feasibility of this concept. We report here a penalty-free cascade experiment of three 4/spl times/4, eight-channel OXCs operated at 2.5 Gbit/s including WDM transmission over 1000-km nondispersion-shifted fiber.