Orthogonal tributary channel exchange of 160-Gbit/s pol-muxed DPSK signal.

We report the orthogonal tributary channel exchange of a polarization-multiplexed (pol-muxed) differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) optical time-division multiplexed (OTDM) signal by exploiting the Kerr effect-induced nonlinear birefringence in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). We first implement Kerr effect-based 40-to-10, 80-to-10, and 160-to-10 Gbit/s demultiplexing of DPSK OTDM signals with power penalties of less than 0.5, 1.5, and 2.6 dB, respectively, at a bit-error rate (BER) of 10(-9). We further demonstrate 10-Gbit/s tributary channel exchange between two orthogonal polarizations of a 160-Gbit/s pol-muxed DPSK OTDM signal with a power penalty of less than 4 dB at a BER of 10(-9). Moreover, Jones matrix analyses are applied to the orthogonal polarization exchange, indicating the exchange condition of orthogonal polarization exchange with the characteristic of transparency to the modulation format. The exchange performance is analyzed in terms of the extinction ratio (ER) of the newly converted signal to the original residual signal. The dynamic range of the product of nonlinear coefficient, pump power, and effective fiber length, the dynamic range of pump power, the impact and tolerance of pump polarization offset are discussed to characterize and optimize the performance of orthogonal polarization exchange.