New all-fiber bidirectional optical cross-connect with tunable fiber Bragg gratings

A new bidirectional optical cross-connect (B-OXC) system where tunable fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) are employed to compose an active wavelength routing processor is proposed. The N×N B-OXC node can be built using N active demultiplexing routers. The total number of channels should be M which equals to that of the Bragg wavelengths in the active router. Experimental demonstration is performed with the 4×4 B-OXC system (N = 4 and M = 4). 980-nm pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifiers amplify the four wavelength-multiplexed signals and a 1×4 coupler splits the wavelength-multiplexed signals. The results showed that the expansion of the proposed B-OXC configuration in wavelength can be easily done by adding fiber ports and FBG's.