Abstract:Based on label stacking principles, presented is a two-hop, coherent detection spectral amplitude code (SAC) labeled system. An optical switching network with two forwarding nodes, two 156Mb/s SAC labels, and 40Gb/s differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK) payload was demonstrated by computer simulation. The system transmission performance is accessed by both received optical power and optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), and the conclusions are given as: after two-hop forwarding, the power penalties and OSNR penalties are less than 3dB for both label and payload.