One-to-Sixteen Wavelength Multicast of Optical Single-Sideband OFDM Signals Using a Single Pulsed Pump

We demonstrate an effective wavelength multicast scheme to generate 16 new channels with low penalty and high spectral efficiency using a single optical pump. The scheme capitalizes on cross-phase modulation of an input signal by a rate-multiplied pump pulse train to generate multiple wavelength channels. The pulse rate is multiplied in an energy-efficient way via the temporal Talbot effect. In the experiment, we have successfully achieved more than 20 multicast copies of a 40-Gb/s QPSK OFDM single-sideband signal. The copied channels are spaced by 50 GHz which is determined by five times multiplication on the repetition rate of a 10-GHz input pump pulse train. The BER performances of the central 16 channels are evaluated, showing less than 1.3-dB OSNR difference among the channels. Compared to the original single-sideband signal, the central channel experiences only a 0.1-dB OSNR penalty in our approach. The result verifies the effectiveness of our scheme in realizing spectrally efficient and high-channel-count wavelength multicast by using a single pump generated with relatively low-speed electronic resources.