Abstract
The optical network is considered as the ideal carrier for next generation 5G wireless signals. In order to benefit from the advantages of the 5G wireless network, such as broad bandwidth and low latency, the optical network needs to replace electronics with all-optical devices. The all-optical semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) device can replace electronics in optical nodes to perform signal wavelength conversion. SOA has advantages of transparency to the signal data rate and modulation format, low cost, and low latency. In this letter, we investigate experimentally the performance of 5G signal switching over optical networks that would use cascaded SOAs as potential all-optical wavelength converters. We consider a K-band 5G signal with quadrature phase shift keying and 16-quadrature amplitude modulation formats. The results show, on average, a ~0.5 dB power penalty due to wavelength conversion using two cascaded SOAs, which reflects the supremacy of using SOAs as wavelength converters for 5G signals.