Experimental Demonstration of a Low-Cost Petabit-Per-Second SDM Network Node

Space division multiplexing (SDM) systems with high spatial channel (SCh) counts have enabled petabit-per-second transmission data-rates [1]. Although high-capacity optical network elements have been demonstrated [2, 3], the cost of such elements may scale prohibitively as required switching resources increase rapidly with SCh counts [4]. A possible solution is to introduce switching restrictions, such as in the spatial channel network (SCN) [5], which restricts network elements to SCh switching in the SDM layer. By imposing a core continuity constraint [6] in the SCN architecture, as shown in Fig. 1a), similar to wavelength conversion restrictions in conventional wavelength-division multiplexed networks, we experimentally implement full spectrum spatial switching [7] with a low-cost SDM network node capable of petabit class switching.