Demonstration of optical de-aggregation of a single 10-Gbit/s QPSK signal to two 5-Gbit/s OOK signals using nonlinear wave mixing and constellation biasing

Optical data format de-aggregation enables the conversion from a single higher-order phase-encoded data channel coming from a high-bandwidth network into two amplitude-modulated signals that may be commonly used in lower-bandwidth local information systems. We experimentally demonstrate the optical de-aggregation of a 10-Gbit/s quadrature phase-shift keyed (QPSK) signal into two 5Gbit/s on-off keyed (OOK) signals. Using wave mixing in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF), we apply two optical effects simultaneously to the input signal: (a) constellation squeezing, in which the 10-Gbit/s QPSK signal is de-aggregated into two different 5-Gbit/s binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals, and (b) constellation biasing, in which the coherent addition of a continuous-wave (CW) bias and the two BPSK signals shifts the data constellation points, resulting in only amplitude modulation and two different 5-Gbit/s OOK signals. The optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) differences at a bit error rate (BER) of 3.8<middle dot>10-3 between the back-to-back (B2B) transmitted OOK signal and the two recovered OOK signals using direct detection are 1.9 dB and 3.2 dB. (c) 2025 Optica Publishing Group. All rights, including for text and data mining (TDM), Artificial Intelligence (AI) training, and similar technologies, are reserved.