Wavelength conversion of 544-Gbit/s dual-carrier PDM-16QAM signal based on the co-polarized dual-pump scheme.

Due to its relative low baud rate as well as simple and cost-efficient implementation, dual-carrier polarization-division-multiplexing 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (PDM-16QAM) is a promising candidate for the next generation optical systems and networks at 400Gb/s per channel. The co-polarized dual-pump scheme, based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in a 1-km high nonlinear fiber (HNLF), can realize the all-optical wavelength conversion (AOWC) of the dual-carrier PDM-16QAM signal with spectral non-inversion and polarization insensitivity. We first experimentally demonstrated AOWC of the 544-Gbit/s dual-carrier PDM-16QAM signal based on the co-polarized dual-pump scheme. We investigated the conversion efficiency (CE) and optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of the converted signal at different pump spacing and pump power. We measured that the OSNR penalty is 0.6 dB due to AOWC when the bit-error ratio (BER) and pump spacing is 2 x 10-2 and 200 GHz, respectively.