Unified support for integrated all-optical multicast and burst amplification in transparent optical network

To better support transparent optical network, we present a novel scalable structure design based on multi-wavelength conversion (MWC) for integrated optical multicast and burst amplification in this paper. We also propose a corresponding wavelength assignment algorithm to minimize the cost of wavelength conversions in the multicast tree. MWC-based multicast strategy makes it possible to generate data copies through less processes and simplifies the wavelength assignment problem. Meanwhile, the generated data copies are used as complementary signals to compensate the power variations of original signal for Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers transient suppression. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of both burst amplification and multicast data generation in one MWC process. Simulation results are given for our new wavelength assignment algorithm, and advantages are shown over greedy algorithms.