Bidirectional Optical Crossconnects Based on FBGs and Optical Circulators

We propose a novel bidirectional optical crossconnect (BOXC) using fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) and optical circulators. Dynamic control for wavelength routing is achieved by employing tunable FBGs. Because only a few optical circulators are used, the proposed BOXC is more cost-effective than previously reported BOXCs. Our preliminary study shows that the proposed BOXC has potentially small insertion loss and low crosstalk. It requires a small tuning range equal to wavelength channel spacing for tunable FBGs. We show that a large BOXC can be built based on the Benes network structure and present a method to reduce the complexity.