All-optical wavelength conversion for polarization shift keying signal based on four-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier

Abstract

We propose an all-optical wavelength conversion method that can preserve the polarization information of an original signal based on four-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier. Using this method, we experimentally demonstrate wavelength conversion for a 10-Gb/s polarization shift keying signal with 1.6-dB power penalty at a 10−9 bit error rate. To our knowledge, it is the first experiment reported on all-optical wavelength conversion for a polarization shift keying format. The converted polarization shift keying signal is successfully transmitted over a 75-km standard single mode fiber with 1.8-dB transmission penalty.