Demonstration of optical de-aggregation of a single 10-Gbit/s QPSK signal to two 5-Gbit/s OOK signals using nonlinear wave mixing and constellation biasing

Optical data format de-aggregation enables the conversion from a single higher-order phase-encoded data channel coming from a high-bandwidth network into two amplitude-modulated signals that may be commonly used in lower-bandwidth local information systems. We experimentally demonstrate the optical de-aggregation of a 10-Gbit/s quadrature phase-shift keyed (QPSK) signal into two 5-Gbit/s on-off keyed (OOK) signals. Using wave mixing in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF), we apply two optical effects simultaneously to the input signal: (a) constellation squeezing, in which the 10-Gbit/s QPSK signal is de-aggregated into two different 5-Gbit/s binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals, and (b) constellation biasing, in which the coherent addition of a continuous-wave (CW) bias and the two BPSK signals shifts the data constellation points, resulting in only amplitude modulation and two different 5-Gbit/s OOK signals. The optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) differences at a bit error rate (BER) of 3.8·10^-3 between the back-to-back (B2B) transmitted OOK signal and the two recovered OOK signals using direct detection are 1.9 dB and 3.2 dB.