Jitter and Amplitude Noise Accumulations in Cascaded All-Optical Regenerators

This paper proposes and demonstrates a simulation model to systematically investigate jitter accumulations in cascaded all-optical 2R regenerators. The simulation results indicate that when the pattern dependence from the memory effect is minimized, the jitter accumulation depends critically on the degree of the regenerative nonlinearity. Studies of tradeoffs between the jitter from bandwidth limitation and the signal-to-noise-ratio degradation help identify the optimized regenerator bandwidth for various degrees of regenerative nonlinearity. The simulation then considers the pattern dependence from the memory effect and finds that it can severely degrade the cascadability of an optical 2R regenerator and can make it worse than that of a linear optical amplifier (optical 1R). The simulation results show good matches to the experimental results of an optical 2R regenerator based on a semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach-Zehnder interferometer. To overcome the jitter accumulation associated with the optical 2R regeneration, we experimentally demonstrate an optical 3R regenerator for optical nonreturn-to-zero signals with all-optical clock recovery. The experiments achieve more than 1000-hop cascadability for pseudorandom binary sequence 231-1 inputs with a 100-km recirculation loop using lab fiber. Field trial experiments then demonstrate a more than 1000-hop cascadability for a 3R spacing of 66 km and a 100-hop cascadability for a 3R spacing of 264 km.