SIMULTANEOUS ALL-OPTICAL PACKET-HEADER REPLACEMENT AND WAVELENGTH SHIFTING FOR A DYNAMICALLY-RECONFIGURABLE WDM NETWORK

We experimentally demonstrate a method of simultaneous all-optical hea der replacement and wavelength shifting, These functions, important in a dynamically-reconfigurable WDM network, are realized by using cross -gain compression in a semiconductor optical amplifier, and by using t hree-level modulation of a probe laser only when We header bits requir e changing, We simultaneously replace the 8-bit header of a 1-Gb/s pac ket and wavelength-shift the entire packet by 19 nm, A receiver sensit ivity of -27 dBm at 10(-9) BER is measured when using a 416-bit NRZ da ta packet Our approach requires no guard bits and allows both the head er and data to be at the same bit rate and wavelength.