Micro-machined optical add/drop multiplexer with client configurability

Abstract

The rapid evolving of optical transport systems into WDM systems has shown clear demands for functionalities inside the optical layer to manipulate the traffic on the wavelength basis. One such important functionality is to use optical add/drop multiplexers (OADM) to add and drop a subset of wavelengths from the transmission system without full opto-electronic regeneration. OADMs play important roles both in optical core networks and in regional access networks. In this paper we demonstrate a client configurable OADM using a 8/spl times/6 micro-machined matrix switch, and propose several OADM architectures to achieve client-configurability in different network environments.