Design of Four-Wave Mixing Frequency-Shift-Free Amplitude Regenerators

Frequency-shift-free all-optical amplitude regenerators based on fiber-four-wave mixing were investigated by means of simulations. These regenerators, comprised of two stages of highly nonlinear dispersion-shifted fiber, were designed using a heuristic procedure that implements a routine based on a genetic algorithm to optimize the device performance. A bit error rate improvement of up to four orders of magnitude was found as compared to a previous design approach discussed in the literature. It was due to a proper choice of the pump signal frequency regarding to the input signal that brings about a trade-off between four-wave mixing optical reshaping and four-wave mixing crosstalk leading to optimal optical regeneration. The proposed design method might be applied to other parametric devices that rely on four-wave mixing.