  Colorless, directionless, and contentionless reconfigurable optical add/drop
multiplexing (CDC-ROADM) provides highly flexible physical layer network
configuration. Such CDC-ROADM must operate in multiple wavelength bands which
are being increasingly implemented in optical transmission systems. The
operation in C+L bands requires switch devices used in CDC-ROADM to also be
capable of multiband operation. Recent studies on wavelength division
multiplexing (WDM) systems have pointed out the impact of amplified spontaneous
emission (ASE) noise generated by signals of different wavelengths, which
causes OSNR degradation. Therefore, it is desirable to filter out the ASE noise
from different transponders when multiplexing multiple wavelengths at the
transmitter side, especially in a system with non-wavelength selective
combiners such as directional couplers and multicast switches. The use of
transponder aggregators with filtering functions, such as the M x N wavelength
selective switch (WSS), is preferable for this filtering. However, the downside
of these devices is that it is difficult to provide economical multiband
support. Therefore, we propose an economical transponder aggregator
configuration by allowing a certain amount of ASE superposition and reducing
the number of filtering functions. In this paper, we fabricated a prototype of
the proposed transponder aggregator by combining silica-based planar lightwave
circuit technology and C+L band WSS, both commercially available, and verified
its feasibility through transmission experiments. The novel transponder
aggregator is a practical solution for a multiband CDC-ROADM system with
improved OSNR performance.
