4 × 160-Gbit/s multi-channel regeneration in a single fiber

Simultaneous regeneration of four high-speed (160 Gbit/s) wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) and polarization-division multiplexed (PDM) signals in a single highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) is demonstrated. The regeneration operation is based on four-wave mixing in HNLF, where the degraded data signals are applied as the pump. As a result, the noise on both '0' and '1' levels can be suppressed simultaneously in our scheme. The stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) from the continuous wave (CW) is suppressed by cross-phase modulation (XPM) from the data pump, relieving the requirement of external phase modulation of the CW light. Mitigation of the inter-channel nonlinearities is achieved mainly through an inter-channel 0.5 bit slot time delay. Bidirectional propagation is also applied to relieve the inter-channel four-wave mixing. The multi-channel regeneration performance is validated by bit-error rate (BER) measurements. The receiver powers at the BER of 10(-9) are improved by 1.9 dB, 1.8 dB, 1.6 dB and 1.5 dB for the four data channels, respectively.