Demonstration of BER-Adaptive WSON Employing Flexible Transmitter/Receiver With an Extended OpenFlow-Based Control Plane

A bit-error rate (BER)-adaptive wavelength-switched optical network (WSON) employing the multiformat and multirate transmitter/receiver is experimentally demonstrated. The flexible transmitter is capable of generating binary phase-shift-keying, quadrature phase-shift-keying, eight-ary quadrature amplitude modulation, 8QAM, and 16QAM, as well as changing the symbol rate. On the other hand, the flexible receiver based on a coherent detection scheme is utilized not only to detect the optical signal with any modulation format/rate, but also to send the BER information to an OpenFlow controller via extended OpenFlow protocols. Since the measured BER is a reliable barometer of the optical path conditions, an extended OpenFlow-based control plane with the OpenFlow controller intelligently determines and assigns either appropriate modulation format/rate or a backup path in WSON in accordance with BER information.