UC San Diego

Rapid advances in broadband services, such as streaming media, video conference, cloud computing and data center, challenge the traditional unicasting and broadcasting network structures. To address the demands of these commercial applications and consequently to increase the cost efficiency and flexibility of optical networks, wavelength multicasting, creating spectrally distinct copies of a signal, has been developed. An ideal wavelength multicaster ought to replicate the signal with preserved integrity and signal to noise ratio (SNR) over a sizable copy number, which is essential to various applications, ranging from commercial to defense. However, most conventional technologies require that the output signal carriers be externally seeded in the multicasting process, and moreover, a majority of the self-seeded approaches are subject to a limited number of signal copies, each with degraded SNR. This is addressed in this dissertation, where we propose a new approach to achieve ultra-low noise wavelength multicasting through a multi- stage dispersion-managed fiber mixer operated in a multi- mode phase-sensitive (PS) architecture. Two operated gain regimes, namely the unsaturated and saturated, were theoretically and experimentally investigated here for the ultra-low noise wavelength multicasting. The multi-mode PS parametric process constructively combines the coherent signal fields, in addition to the parametric effect induced nonlinear gain, leading to gain and conversion efficiency improvement. Having the PS process induced gain, the dispersion-managed fiber mixer with locally accumulated uncorrelated noise allows theoretically noiseless wavelength multicasting. In practical implementation, experimental characterizations on noise figure and bit-error-rate performance require the multi- mode PS parametric multicasting be operated in the unsaturated regime. Conversely, in phase encoded systems, the PS process inherently translates the phase noise into amplitude perturbations, while the resulting amplitude noise can be removed by the saturated parametric effect, leading to an all-optical amplitude and phase regenerative wavelength multicasting. The dissertation includes theoretical analysis, experimental implementation, and reports record performances of the multi-mode phase- sensitive parametric wavelength multicasting