An investigation on all-optical multicast technology in all-optical networks

Optical fiber communication has the characteristics of large transmission capacity, long transmission distance and good transmission efficiency, which could satisfy the ever-increasing bandwidth data communication requirements. All-optical network can directly process signal in the optical domain with the conventional optical - electrical - optical conversion and improve the signal processing speed. All-optical multicast technology is an important part of all-optical networks, which can improve the flexibility of the network and make better use of network resources. In this paper, four kinds of nonlinear effects are investigated to realize all-optical multicast, including cross-gain modulation (XGM), cross-phase modulation (XPM), four-wave mixing (FWM) and cascaded sum frequency generation (SFG)/difference frequency generation (DFG). The principle and multicast performance of these nonlinear effects are discussed. Moreover, the characteristics of several kinds of nonlinear devices are also compared, including SOA, HNLF, PPLN.