A novel optical cell compressor for optical time division multiplexing system

A novel optical cell compressor for optical time division multiplexing system is presented. The compressor is capable of generating optically compressed very high bit-rate (possibly several tens of Gb/s) signals with minimum hardware. Contrast to the previously reported optical compressor, the compressor is mainly composed of passive optical devices and requires no synchronization among control signals in the process of compression, which results in simple implementation. We demonstrate a generation of optically compressed 6 Gb/s optical cells to confirm the fundamental operation of the compressor.