3R optical regeneration: an all-optical solution with BER improvement

Abstract

We demonstrate that an optical regenerator architecture providing re-amplification, re-shaping, and re-timing based on the principle of spectral shift followed by filtering can lead to bit error ratio improvement of the signal passing through it. This is in contrast with typical regenerators based on the usual principle of power conversion from a transfer function, which are unable to improve the bit error ratio. At first, we provide the theoretical basis that explains this improvement. Then we present the regenerator architecture based on spectral shift followed by filtering and provide experimental evidence of bit error ratio improvement of a noisy signal from 3x10(-6) without regenerator to 2x10(-10) with regenerator.