title: Experimental demonstration of gridless spectrum and time optical switching.
abstract: An experimental demonstration of gridless spectrum and time switching is presented. We propose and demonstrate a bit-rate and modulation-format independent optical cross-connect architecture, based on gridless spectrum selective switch, 20-ms 3D-MEMS and 10-ns PLZT optical switches, that supports arbitrary spectrum allocation and transparent time multiplexing. The architecture is implemented in a four-node field-fiber-linked testbed to transport continuous RZ and NRZ data channels at 12.5, 42.7 and 170.8 Gb/s, and selectively groom sub-wavelength RZ channels at 42.7 Gb/s. We also showed that the architecture is dynamic and can be reconfigured to meet the routing requirements of the network traffic. Results show error-free operation with an end-to-end power penalty between 0.8 dB and 5 dB for all continuous and sub-wavelength channels.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK. namaya@essex.ac.uk
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Amaya
authors.forename: G S
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Zervas
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Irfan
authors.forename: Y R
authors.initials: YR
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lord
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Simeonidou