Enhanced Performance of Wavelength Multicasting by Gain-Transparent Stimulated Brillouin Scattering

Wavelength multicasting is one of the desirable functional blocks in future reconfigurable optical networks. The four-wave-mixing Bragg scattering-based wavelength multicasting can provide modulation format transparency and polarization-independent operation with comparatively low system complexity. One crucial challenge of this scheme is that the conversion efficiencies of the red-shifted and blue-shifted generated copies are imbalanced due to non-uniform phase matching conditions. The asymmetry is even worse when the generated copies are spread over a large spectral range. To solve this problem, we utilize gain-transparent stimulated Brillouin scattering in the nonlinear fiber to introduce a spectrally localized nonlinear phase to reduce the imbalance, resulting in enhanced performance of the wavelength multicasting system.