40 Gb/s all-optical regeneration based on the pump depletion effect in fiber parametric amplification

A novel all-optical regeneration scheme based on fiber-optic parametric amplification operating under the strong pump depletion regime is numerically demonstrated and investigated. It is shown that a high-power intensity modulated signal depletes the continuous wave pump in such a manner that the latter becomes intensity modulated and inverted compared to the signal. A cascade of two such devices that are working under strong pump-depletion has the potential to provide a noninverted, either wavelength converted or not, amplitude modulated output, which exhibits regenerative characteristics with respect to the input signal. In this work, an extended numerical analysis accompanied with theoretical support provides the power transfer characteristics and the phase analysis of the proposed regenerator under various operating conditions. Dynamic numerical simulations are also carried out in order to evaluate the regenerative performance of the proposed scheme in a long-haul transmission system. The cascadability analysis reveals the ability of the proposed regenerator to operate efficiently for both return and nonreturn to zero intensity modulated signals. The proposed reshaping technique is numerically compared to other schemes based on parametric amplification in fibers that have been reported in the literature. The numerical analysis shows the potential of the proposed scheme to compete and even outperform the other parametric regenerators.