N*N multiwavelength optical cross-connect based on tunable fiber Bragg gratings

We propose a highly channel-scalable multiwavelength optical cross-connect (OXC) based on tunable fiber Bragg gratings (TFBGs), which is suited for metropolitan or access networks. N*N OXC of this architecture is constructed by cascading independently operating routing modules, and each routing module consists of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) with fixed center wavelength and a TFBG-based N*N routing block. The group velocity dispersion (GVD) and intraband crosstalk (IXT) are the main signal-degrading factors arising from the operation of the proposed OXC, and the effectiveness of each factor is individually investigated numerically for 10-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) systems. Then, a routing experiment of the proposed OXC is carried out in a 3*3 routing block configuration, using OC-192 signals with channel spacing of 0.8 nm. Finally, the installable size of the proposed OXC and network scale are estimated by resorting to a comprehensive numerical simulation of 10-Gb/s NRZ signal transmission.