3R optical regenerator improves bit-error ratio

Researchers at the University of Sydney (Sydney, Australia) have demonstrated a reamplification, reshaping, and retiming (3R) optical regenerator architecture that can improve the bit-error ratio (BER) of a signal passing through it. Typical 2R (reamplifying and reshaping)) and 3R regenerators provide output power based only on instantaneous input power; a noisy input signal exits such regenerators with a BER that is degraded or at best identical to the input BER.

The Australian researchers present a 2R and a 3R regeneration architecture that improves BER based on the principle of nonlinear spectral broadening (for 2R) or nonlinear spectral shifting (for 3R), followed by filtering, experimentally showing that the 3R regenerator discriminates pulses of different widths by assigning them different power transfer functions. With their 3R architecture, they demonstrated BER improvement of a noisy signal by four orders of magnitude, from 3 × 10-6 without the regenerator to 2 × 10-10, and expect further BER improvement with optimization of regenerator parameters. Contact Martin Rochette at[email protected] or [email protected].