We experimentally demonstrate multichannel wavelength multicasting for two nonreturn-to-zero quadrature phase-shift keying (NRZ-QPSK) channels based on four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Through the interaction with the two pumps in SOA, the input two 25 Gb/s NRZ-QPSK channels are successfully simultaneously multicast to five and two new wavelengths, respectively. All the multicast channels are with a power penalty less than 2.5 dB at a bit error rate (BER) of 10-3. A characterization of the system performance using conversion efficiency and BER as figures-of-merit in terms of pump and signal powers is also presented. The results indicate that the pump and signal powers can be optimized to eliminate the introduced deleterious nonlinear components. The wavelengths of the two NRZ-QPSK channels and the two pumps need to be specified to avoid the crosstalk induced by high-order FWM.

A novel scalable and integrated design that supports optical multicast and burst amplification is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. The powers of incoming signals can be tuned to optimize the results of burst amplification and replication. Experimental results also show that erbium-doped optical Fiber amplication (EDFA) transients can be suppressed to an equally low level regardless of the burst parameters. Extended structure designs are further proposed to satisfy the need of mass replication of multicast signals.

To improve the restoration performance of a multicast service of multi-protocol label switching transport profile (MPLS-TP) enabled optical network, this letter proposes a local-node initiated fast restoration (LNIFR) scheme for MPLS-TP optical multicast service. The proposed scheme allows the local node to establish a segment of fast loopback label switch path by the local node along the upstream of the failed node or link to the nearest downstream node. The fast restoration of optical multicast trees is realized through this part restoration, which focuses on failed node or link. Simulation analysis and results demonstrate that the new scheme outperforms the other schemes in terms of restoration time and success rate.

We propose a novel wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical network (WDM-PON) to simultaneously transmit unicast data and multicast services with upstream data re-modulation in optical network units (ONUs). For each wavelength channel in the optical line terminal (OLT), the downstream unicast data are applied to one arm of a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator (DPMZM) to generate baseband unicast non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal. A radio frequency (RF) control signal is applied to the other arm to present two un-modulated sidebands for multicast data modulation in a differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) format. The flexible and dynamic multicast services are realized by simply switching the RF control signal on or off. The proposed scheme is experimentally demonstrated with 1.25-Gb/s downstream unicast, multicast, and upstream data.

Different multicasting schemes in optical packet switched networks are discussed, including the parallel mode, serial mode, and hybrid mode multicasting schemes. Simulated modeling technique is applied to compare the network-level performance of the three multicasting schemes. A conclusion can be drawn from the results that since the hybrid-mode multicasting scheme can increase the multicast success ratio and reduce the packet retransmission times compared with the other two schemes, it is the best choice for delivering multicasting sessions in the optical packet switched networks.