Tunable optical multicasting of PDM-OFDM signals by novel polarization-interleaved multi-pump FWM scheme

Optical multicasting that supports point-to-multipoint traffic replication can be one of the necessary techniques in next-generation all-optical elastic networks. In this paper, we propose an optical multicasting approach for polarization-division-multiplexing (PDM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals based on a novel polarization-interleaved multi-pump (PIMP) four-wave mixing (FWM) scheme in highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). Besides format transparency and the support of PDM signals, the scheme further enables wide spectral tunability of generated replicas. The pump frequency arrangement for the scheme is presented, which successfully prevents the replicas from being superimposed by unwanted FWM components during tuning. We experimentally demonstrate multicasting operation of a 3-band 100-Gb/s PDM-OFDM signal. With different input positions, 1.4 and 1.6 Terahertz tuning ranges of four replicas are achieved with Q-factor performance better than the forward error correction threshold. Tunable replica spacing from 100-GHz to 250-GHz are also verified. In addition, the scalability of the scheme is demonstrated via 5-pump multicasting, successfully generating a total of 14 replicas.