All-Optical Format Conversion for Star-8QAM Signals Based on Nonlinear Effects in Elastic Optical Networks

An all-optical format conversion (AOFC) scheme for star-octal quadrature amplitude modulation (star-8QAM) signals is proposed and numerically simulated based on nonlinear effects in the high nonlinear fiber (HNLF). In the first stage AOFC processing, the input 30 Gbit/s star-8QAM signal is firstly de-aggregated into one 20 Gbit/s quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signal and one 10 Gbit/s typical on-off keying (OOK) signal by deploying the self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM) and parametric amplification (PA) effects. In the second stage AOFC processing, the 20 Gbit/s QPSK signal and the 10 Gbit/s typical OOK signal are aggregated into one 30 Gbit/s star-8QAM signal again by utilizing the XPM and PA effects. Moreover, the amplitude ratio (AR) between the outer ring and inner rings of the aggregated star-8QAM signal can be adjusted flexibly by changing the QPSK and OOK signals power. Other octal modulation formats can also be generated through changing the QPSK and OOK signals power, including the rectangular 8QAM signals, $\pi$ /4-8QAM signals and 8-ary phase shift keying (8PSK) signals. Error vector magnitude (EVM) and bit error ratio (BER) for star-8QAM signals before and after AOFC are measured to analyse the scheme performance. The AOFC scheme provides the flexibility to adopt the appreciate modulation formats at the optical nodes to connect different optical networks.