Quaternary optical packets generated by fiber four-wave mixing

Recent work suggests that fiber four-wave mixing may be used to merge two wavelength multiplexed binary channels into a single quaternary signal. In this letter, we investigate the application of this technique to the optical packets generation considering that a 10-Gb/s payload is optically multiplexed to a 2.5-Gb/s label. Computer simulations are used to analyze the propagation of the generated quaternary optical packet in the dominance of amplified spontaneous emission noise. Results suggest that the optical packet may be propagated through metropolitan area networks length scales and that an average power around 0 dBm should be used to minimize the packet bit-error rate.