WDM transmission experiments over cascaded sections of optical links including wavelength converting 2R-transponders have been carried out in a loop testbed. Using dispersion compensated links and simple direct modulated transponder lasers, up to 11 cascaded crossconnects and 1750 km trunk lines have been bridged with 2.5 Gbit/s NRZ signals. The limitations are given mainly due to the accumulated jitter as it is shown by numerical simulations. The results indicate, that 2R-transponders are a useful approach to a flexible WDM network design using bitrate-transparent wavelength conversion.

WDM transmission experiments over cascaded sections of optical links including wavelength converting 2R-transponders have been carried out in a loop testbed. Using dispersion compensated links and simple direct modulated transponder lasers, up to 11 cascaded crossconnects and 1750 km trunk lines have been bridged with 2.5 Gbit/s NRZ signals. The limitations are given mainly due to the accumulated jitter as it is shown by numerical simulations. The results indicate, that 2R-transponders are a useful approach to a flexible WDM network design using bitrate-transparent wavelength conversion.