Analysis of format conversion from optical 16QAM to QPSK based on cascaded four-wave mixing in semiconductor optical amplifier

Abstract A scheme of format conversion from optical 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) to quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signal based on cascaded four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) is proposed. Theoretical analysis and simulations of the format conversion scheme are conducted to validate the feasibility of the proposal. In this proposal, the phase conjugated of 16QAM signal is generated after the first FWM process in an SOA, and then the QPSK signal is converted due to the second non-degenerate FWM (ND-FWM) process in another SOA. The performance and the optimal design of the 10 Gbit/s format conversion system under various key parameters of SOAs are evaluated and discussed. Simulation results present useful to enable interconnection between backbone network and access network.