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Introduction |
Ultrafast optical networks are growing at incredible rates, driven by both an increase in the number of connections and the demand for higher bandwidth applications, mainly video content. Dense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology has been playing one of the most important roles to support this evolution by providing a rapid and timely capacity increase. Today, commercial long-haul C+L-band lightwave systems carry up to 192 channels at up to 250 Gb/s on a 50-GHz grid, corresponding to an aggregate long-haul capacity of ~48 Tb/s and for short-reach applications up to 400 Gb/s, for a total capacity of up to 76 Tb/s [1,2]. Research records have achieved a net per-carrier interface rate in excess of 1 Tb/s [3,4], ...
