Multi-access fiber-optic time dissemination with bidirectional optical-electrical-optical nodes.

We first report multi-access time dissemination with bidirectional optical-electrical-optical (BOEO) nodes based on bidirectional time division multiplexing transmission over a single fiber with the same wavelength. Each BOEO node can be simultaneously served as a bidirectional amplifier, an isolator, and a multi-access time dissemination node to boost the faded bidirectional optical signals, to effectively suppress the accumulated noise along the main fiber link, and to extract synchronized time signals, respectively. We experimentally demonstrate multi-access time dissemination with two BOEO nodes in our time dissemination apparatus with the main fiber link up to 350 km. The results illustrate that stabilities in terms of time deviation of 23.2 ps at the integration time of 1 s and 3.8 ps at the integration time of 10