Dispersion division multiplexing for in-band subcarrier-header-based all-optical packet switching

We propose a method to transmit SCM-header at a subcarrier frequency lower than the data-rate, specifically at 7.7 GHz for 10 Gb/s data-rate, using dispersion division multiplexed subcarrier transmission. It is important to note that this is not possible using standard SCM transmission, since the subcarrier placed at such a low frequency can´t be filtered out efficiently and this would deteriorate the detected data performance greatly. This technique permits efficient optical bandwidth utilization and results in little power penalty for the received data, since the SCM header channel is invisible with respect to the data channel detector.