Static and dynamic switching performance of a metro WDM ring using linear optical amplifiers

The authors demonstrate the performance of a dynamic and reconfigurable metro-size wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) ring employing eight cascaded linear optical amplifiers. The ring has eight uncorrelated WDM channels, modulated at 10 Gb/s each. The measured Q-factors of all channels are between 17.6 and 18.7 dB, corresponding to a bit-error rate of less than 2/spl times/10/sup -14/. In an add/drop experiment, dynamic switching of channels does not affect transmission quality of the through channels.