Optical Path Aggregation for 1-Tb/s Transmission in Spectrum-Sliced Elastic Optical Path Network

We propose and experimentally demonstrate optical path aggregation in a spectrum-sliced elastic optical path network (SLICE). Multiple optical orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexed (OFDM) 100-Gb/s optical paths are aggregated in the optical domain to form a spectrally continuous 1-Tb/s super-wavelength optical path and transmitted over a network of bandwidth-variable wavelength cross-connects. We evaluate the potential implementation issues and conclude that the OFDM paths can be optically aggregated with optical signal-to-noise ratio penalty of less than 1 dB.