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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 14, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2002

Evaluation of Intraband Crosstalk in an FBGOC-Based Optical Cross Connect

Xiangnong Wu, Chao Lu, Member, IEEE, Z. Ghassemlooy, and Yixin Wang
AbstractAn analytical model of intraband optical crosstalk in fiber Bragg grating optical circulator-based optical an cross connect (OXC) is presented. Results show that the worst-case coherent crosstalk is 2226 dB higher than incoherent crosstalk, depending on the switching state of 2 2 OXC. In addition, a novel scheme of OXC with improved intraband crosstalk performance is proposed. Index TermsFiber Bragg grating, optical circulator, optical fiber communication, optical cross connect, optical networks, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).
Fig. 1. Intraband optical crosstalk.

I. INTRODUCTION N WAVELENGTH-DIVISION-MULTIPLEXED optical networks, intraband and/or interband crosstalk plays a major role in limiting practical implementation of an OXC subsystem. The latter can be removed with narrow-band filter, since it is generally nonaccumulative while propagating through nodes [1]. The former, which falls within the signal wavelength slot as shown in Fig. 1, cannot be simply eliminated by filtering and results in unacceptable signal degradation. Crosstalk analyzes of optical cross connects (OXCs) presented so far are generally focused on conventional OXCs [2], [3]. Tunable fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based devices present a promising alternative [4], [5], however, there has been no crosstalk modeling of this type of OXC in the literature. In this letter, an analytical model is established to evaluate intraband crosstalk performance and a novel scheme with improved intraband crosstalk performance is proposed. II. MODELS OF OPTICAL CROSSTALK The intraband crosstalk is contributed by first-, second-, and higher order crosstalk, as shown in Fig. 1. It is dominated by the term of first-order crosstalk. For example, the level of first-order crosstalk is 40 dB, the term of second-order crosstalk is, thus, 80 dB, which is 40 dB smaller than the term of first-order. Here crosstalk higher than second-order is too small and not considered. Fig. 2 shows a schematic structure of an -channel FBGoptical circulator (OC)-based OXC composed 2 OXCs. In the example here, of (2 -1) stages of 2 represents the number of input/output fibers and
Manuscript received May 30, 2001; revised September 14, 2001. X. Wu, C. Lu, and Y. Wang are with the Network Technology Research Centre, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639798 Singapore, Republic of Singapore (e-mail: eclu@ntu.edu.sg). Z. Ghassemlooy is with the Optical Communications Research Group, School of Engineering, Sheffield Hallam University, S1 1WB Sheffield, U.K. Publisher Item Identifier S 1041-1135(02)00251-3. (a)

Fig. 2. A typical 4

2 4 FBGOC-based OXC.

(b) Fig. 3. Two switching states of a 2

2 2 OXC. (a) Bar state. (b) Cross state.

is the number of wavelengths per fiber. A general 2 2 OXC is shown in Fig. 3. Depending on the switching states of tunable FBGs, the input signals with the same wavelengths can be

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routed to any of the output fibers. We designate that an arbitrary channel is in the bar state when it is reflected at the matching th FBG with a Bragg wavelength . In this case, the channel signal inserted in th input fiber will appear at the th output fiber. Similarly, an arbitrary channel is in the cross state when . it passes through th FBG with a central wavelength In this case, channel signal inserted from th input fiber will . In Fig. 3, the emerge from the th output fiber where thick solid lines are the paths for the main channel signals from inlet fiber 1; the dashed and short dashed lines are the first- and second-order crosstalk, respectively. The first-order crosstalk is mainly due to leakage paths in FBGs and OCs. Here, we assume that all 2 2 OXC stages are in bar state and the FBGs sideband profile has caused an average crosstalk over all other channels. The losses of devices, i.e., FBG of or OC, will not be considered. Following a similar method as in [3], the worst-case optical power at the output of the first stage, see Figs. 2 and 3(a), can be given as

Fig. 4. Incoherent optical crosstalk versus component crosstalk of different values of ( 40, 60, 80, and 100 dB).

X =0 0 0

for

At the output of an coherent crosstalk we have

OXC, using the same definitions of and incoherent crosstalk as in [3],

(1) (4) and are the input power of the signal where and , respectively. is the OC channel from fibers is the FBG crosstalk, crosstalk, is FBG reflectivity, is the signal power at the output of each stage, designates the wavelength channel ), is the number of the inlet fiber ( ), ( is the path stages ( ), and is the initial input optical power of th channel from th inlet. The first and second terms are the power of signal and crosstalk, respectively. The third and forth terms are the signalcrosstalk beat noise, and the last term is the crosstalkcrosstalk beat noise. For the is simply case of all stages being in the cross state, all in (1). For simplicity, we have assumed that replaced by . Thus, the all channels have the same initial input power power at the output of the first stage is given as

(5) Note that both crosstalks depend on network parameter , and and . They are completely indecomponent crosstalk pendent of the number of wavelength channels per fiber , and . Expanding or the input optical power level by Taylor series, at the output of OXC, the number of first-order and second-order crosstalk contributions can be easily obtained. III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

(2) In practical OXCs, incoherent intraband crosstalk is dominant, since signals with the same wavelength in different fibers are normally generated from different light sources and no beat noise exists. However, intensity beat noise may arise from incoherent signals if they originate from closely wavelength-matched sources, whose beat may fall within the is calculated against receiver bandwidth. Using (5),

And the output power at th stage is given as

(3)

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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 14, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2002

Fig. 5. Coherent and incoherent optical crosstalk versus the number of 2 OXCs cascaded.

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Fig. 6. A dilated 2 crosstalk performance.

2 FBGOC-based OXC with improved intraband

for different values of , and the results are shown in Fig. 4. The profiles show a threshold characteristic and the threshold level depends on the component crosstalk. Using commercially dB and dB, available devices with the minimum achievable crosstalk is 40 dB, which is limited . In (5), the function of incoherent crosstalk is by the and , therefore, the symmetric to the variables of and are replaced same profiles will be achieved if by each other. To investigate crosstalk accumulation effect in a cascade of 2 OXCs, and are calculated for a number of 2 ) for all being in the bar or cross state (see cascaded stages (2 and are 45, 37, Fig. 5). The values used for and 55 dB, respectively. Both crosstalk increase nonlinearly as increases, with the best performance achieved at 2 . , and for cross state are 3.5 and 4.7 dB higher than ), sets the the bar state, respectively. For all stages ( sets the lower limit of upper limit, as expected, whereas 2030 dB. In practical systems, will be the dominant crosstalk, since it is very unlikely that all the channels at the same wavelength will originate from the same source. From Fig. 4, it is obvious that the crosstalk performance is . To further improve the crosstalk performance, limited by we follow the principle of spatial dilation mentioned in [6] and propose a dilated 2 2 FBG-based OXC shown in Fig. 6, where A, B, C, and D are identical sets of FBGs, each containing channels FBGs, as those in Fig. 2, OC1 and OC2 are nonreciprocal four-port optical circulators. Two optical isolators are used to remove possible multiple reflections between two FBGs at the same channel. The original intraband crosstalk will be reto . This is anticipated to greatly relax duced from

the requirements to the component, especially FBGs. With the dB for OC, even using same crosstalk level of dB, we can still achieve FBGs with crosstalk level an optical crosstalk of 60 dB in a 2 2 OXC. IV. CONCLUSION We have theoretically studied optical crosstalk in a typical FBGOC-based OXC. Under different switching states, there exists a range of crosstalk performance. Results show that the worst-case coherent crosstalk is about 2226 dB higher than incoherent crosstalk, depending on the switching states of 2 2 OXCs. Finally, a novel scheme of 2 2 OXC with much improved intraband crosstalk is proposed to meet different requirements of practical systems. REFERENCES
[1] J. Zhou, R. Cadeddu, E. Casaccia, C. Cavazzoni, and M. OMahony, Crosstalk in multiwavelength optical cross-connect networks, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 14, pp. 14231435, June 1996. [2] L. Giliner, C. P. Larsen, and M. Gustavsson, Scalability of optical multiwavelength switching networks: Crosstalk analysis, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 17, pp. 5867, Jan. 1999. [3] T. Gyselings, G. Morthier, and R. Baets, Crosstalk analysis in multiwavelength optical cross connects, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 17, pp. 12731283, Aug. 1999. [4] Y. K. Chen and C. C. Lee, Fiber Bragg grating-based large nonblocking multiwavelength cross-connects, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 16, pp. 17461756, Oct. 1998. [5] X. Wu, Y. Shen, C. Lu, T. H. Cheng, and M. K. Rao, Fiber Bragg grating-based rearrangeable nonblocking optical cross connects using multiport optical circulators, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 12, pp. 696698, June 2000. [6] R. Ramaswami and K. N. Sivarajan, Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.