All-optical 3R regeneration for DPSK signal based on a semiconductor optical amplifier scheme

This paper presents experimental demonstration of an all-optical 3 R (re-amplification, re-shaping, re-timing) regeneration scheme for differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) signals, which consists of a clock recovery module and a phase-regeneration module. The clock recovery module is based on a mode-locked fiber laser, and the optical clock is extracted with low timing jitter of 29 ps from a degraded 10 Gb/s DPSK signal. The phase regenerator consists of a one-bit delay interferometer demodulation stage and a semiconductor optical amplifier in which cross-phase modulation and nonlinear polarization rotation occur simultaneously. The results show that, after 3 R regeneration, the receiver sensitivity is improved by more than 1.6 dB for a bit error rate of 1 E-9.