Optical Channel Capacity Upgrade Based on Multiwavelength Conversion XGM Using Semiconductor Optical Amplifier for Access Networks

This paper demonstrates a 10 Gb/s one-to-two-wavelength conversion configuration based on cross-gain modulation for optical access networks using a single TW-SOA. The method is capable of converting a signal data of specific wavelength 1541 nm to certain wavelengths of CW’s laser 1554 nm and 1558 nm with 4 nm spacing. The pump power level was classified due to channel response. A result obtained was the best power level offering wavelength converter between −6 and 3 dBm. The conversion efficiency achievement provided an acceptable result for probe signals. The findings of Q-factor performance were investigated. The Q values were found to be more than 9 for point to point transmission and 20 km fiber configurations for the original and converted signal. The technique implemented at 20 km and the power of all channels were adequate to provide a splitting ratio of 1/64 for the launched pump power 3 dBm

Devices and Fibers for Ultrawideband Optical Communications

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) has historically enabled the increase in the capacity of optical systems by progressively populating the existing optical bandwidth of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) in the C-band. Nowadays, the number of channels—needed in optical systems—is approaching the maximum capacity of standard C-band EDFAs. As a result, the industry worked on novel approaches, such as the use of multicore fibers, the extension of the available spectrum of the C-band EDFAs, and the development of transmission systems covering C- and L-bands and beyond. In the context of continuous traffic growth, ultrawideband (UWB) WDM transmission systems appear as a promising technology to leverage the bandwidth of already deployed optical fiber infrastructure and sustain the traffic demand for the years to come. Since the pioneering demonstrations of UWB transmission a few years ago, long strides have been taken toward UWB technologies. In this review article, we discuss how the most recent advances in the design and fabrication of enabling devices, such as lasers, amplifiers, optical switches, and modulators, have improved the performance of UWB systems, paving the way to turn research demonstrations into future products. In addition, we also report on the advances in UWB optical fibers, such as the recently introduced nested antiresonant nodeless fibers (NANFs), whose future implementations could potentially provide up to 300-nm-wide bandwidth at less than 0.2 dB/km loss

Optical techniques for broadband in-building networks

Optical fibres, which can easily handle any bandwidth demand, have been rolled out to more than 32 million consumer’s homes and professional buildings worldwide up to 2010. The basic technological and economical challenges of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) has been solved. The current FTTH technology can now providing baseband Gbit Ethernet and high definition TV services to the gates of homes. Thus, the bottleneck for delivery of broadband services to the end users is shifting from the access network to the in-building network. In the meantime, the need for high-capacity transmission between devices inside the building, e.g. between desktop PC and data services, are also rapidly increase. How to bring high bandwidth to the mobile terminals such as laptops, PDAs or cell phones as well as to the fixed terminals such as desktop PCs and HDTV equipment in an all-in-one network infrastructure is a challenge we are facing. Building on the flexibility of the wireless access networks and the latent vast bandwidth of a fibre infrastructure, radio-over-fibre (RoF) techniques have been proposed as a cost-effective solution to the future integrated broadband services in in-building networks. This thesis investigates techniques to deliver high data rate wireless services via in-building networks: high capacity RoF links employing optical frequency multiplication (OFM) and sub-carrier multiplexing (SCM) techniques, with single- or multi-carrier signal formats. The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) format is investigated for the RoF transmission system, particularly with regard to the optical system nonlinearity. For low-cost short-range optical backbone networks, RoF transmission over large-core diameter plastic optical fibre (POF) links has been studied, including the transmission of the WiMedia-compliant multiband OFDM UWB signal over bandwidth-limited large-core POF as well as a full-duplex bi-directional UWB transmission over POF. In order to improve the functionalities for delivery of wireless services of in-building networks, techniques to introduce flexibility into the network architecture and to create dynamic capacity allocation have been investigated. By employing optical switching techniques based on optical semiconductor amplifiers (SOA), an optically routed RoF system has been studied. The dynamic capacity allocation is addressed by investigating one-dimensional and two-dimensional routing using electrical SCM and optical wavelengths. In addition, next to RoF networking, this thesis explores techniques for wired delivery of baseband high capacity services over POF links by employing a multi-level signal modulation format, in particular discrete multi-tone (DMT) modulation. Transmission of 10 Gbit/s data over 1 mm core diameter PMMA POF links is demonstrated, as a competitor to more expensive fibre solutions such as silica single and multimode fibre. A record transmission rate of more than 40 Gbit/s is presented for POF whose core diameter is comparable with silica multimode fibre. Finally, from the network perspective, the convergence of wired and wireless multi-standard services into a single fibre-based infrastructure has been studied. Techniques have been designed and demonstrated for in-building networks, which can convey both high capacity baseband services and broadband radio frequency (RF) services over a POF backbone link. The multi-standard RoF signals carry different wireless services at different radio frequencies and with different bandwidths, including WiFi, WiMax, UMTS and UWB. System setups to carry them together over the same multimode optical fibre based network have been designed and experimentally shown. All the concepts, designs and system experiments presented in this thesis underline the strong potential of multimode (silica and plastic) optical fibre techniques for the delivery of broadband services to wired and wireless devices in in-building networks, in order to extend to the end user the benefits of the broadband FTTH networks which are being installed and deployed worldwide

Advances in Optical Amplifiers

Optical amplifiers play a central role in all categories of fibre communications systems and networks. By compensating for the losses exerted by the transmission medium and the components through which the signals pass, they reduce the need for expensive and slow optical-electrical-optical conversion. The photonic gain media, which are normally based on glass- or semiconductor-based waveguides, can amplify many high speed wavelength division multiplexed channels simultaneously. Recent research has also concentrated on wavelength conversion, switching, demultiplexing in the time domain and other enhanced functions. Advances in Optical Amplifiers presents up to date results on amplifier performance, along with explanations of their relevance, from leading researchers in the field. Its chapters cover amplifiers based on rare earth doped fibres and waveguides, stimulated Raman scattering, nonlinear parametric processes and semiconductor media. Wavelength conversion and other enhanced signal processing functions are also considered in depth. This book is targeted at research, development and design engineers from teams in manufacturing industry, academia and telecommunications service operators

Single-fiber lightwave centralized WDM-OFDMA- PON with colorless optical network units

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a carrier-reuse, single-feeder, wavelength-division-multiplexed, orthogonal-frequency-division-multiple-access passive optical network (WDM-OFDMA-PON) with colorless direct-detection optical network units and coherent detection optical line terminals. We examine two strategies by adjusting the frequency occupancy and the modulation format of the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) signals. We investigate the impact of DL signal-to-carrier ratio on performance of both UL and DL via simulations and identify impairments limiting system performance. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate on a single wavelength channel, a realization of each of the two scenarios investigated using orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM). A quadrature phase-shift keying approach with wide spectrum and narrow guard band achieves 21.6 Gb/s. A 32-ary quadrature amplitude modulation approach with narrow spectrum and wide guard band achieves 14.5 Gb/s and a span of over 80 km

The Experimental Design of Radio-over-Fibre System for 4G Long Term Evolution

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the potential key to meet the exponentially increasing demand of the mobile end users. The entire LTE network architecture and signal processing is carried out at the enhanced NodeB (eNB) level, hence the increased complexity and cost. Therefore, it is not efficient to deploy eNB for the purpose of extending the network coverage. As a solution, deployment of relay node (RN), with radio-over-fibre (RoF) acting as the interface between eNB and RN is proposed. Due to the high path loss and multipath fading, wireless interface would not be the ideal channel between eNB and RN. A detailed investigation is carried out by comparing the Rayleigh multipath fading channel with the optical fibre channel, where the latter achieved a ~31 dB of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain. The distributed feedback laser (DFB) is selected as the direct modulated laser (DML) source, where the modulation method introduces a positive frequency chirp (PFC). The existing mathematical expression does not precisely explain on how the rate equations contribute to PFC. Therefore, an expression for PFC is proposed and derived from the carrier and photon densities of the rate equations. Focusing on theoretical development of DML based RoF system, a varying fast Fourier transform (FFT) scheme is introduced into LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technology as an alternative design to the carrier aggregation. A range of FFT sizes are investigated with different levels of optical launch power (OLP), the optimum OLP has been defined to be within the range of ~-6 to 0 dBm, which is known as the intermixing region. It is found that FFT size-128 provides improved average system efficiency of ~54% and ~65% in comparison to FFT size-64 and FFT size-128, respectively, within the intermixing region. While fixing FFT size to 128, the investigation is diverted to the optimisation of optical modulators. The author revealed that the performance of dual electrode-Mach Zehnder modulator (DE-MZM) is superior to both DML scheme and single electrode (SE)-MZM, where DE-MZM achieved a transmission span of 88 km and 71 km for 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 64-QAM, respectively. At the initial experimental link design and optimisation stage, an optimum modulation region (OMR) is proposed at the optical modulation index (OMI) of 0.38, which resulted in an average error vector magnitude (EVM) of ~1.01% for a 10 km span. The EVM of ~1.01% is further improved by introducing the optimum OLP region at –2 dBm, where the observed average EVM trimmed to ~0.96%. There is no deviation found in the intermixing region by transmitting the LTE signal through a varying transmission span of 10 to 60 km, additionally, it was also revealed that the LTE RoF nonlinear threshold falls above the OLP of 6 dBm. The proposed system was further developed to accommodate 2×2 multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) transmission by utilising analogue frequency division multiplexing (FDM) technique. The studies procured that the resulting output quality of signal at 2 GHz and 2.6 GHz is almost identical with a twofold gain in the peak data rate and no occurrence of intermodulation (IMD). In order to emulate the complete LTE RoF solution, an experimental design of full duplex frequency division duplex (FDD) system with dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) architecture is proposed. It is found that channel spacing of 50 MHz between the downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) introduces severe IMD distortion, where an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) penalty of 14.10 dB is observed. Finally, a novel nonlinear compensation technique utilising a direct modulation based frequency dithering (DMFD) scheme is proposed. The LTE RoF system average SNR gain observed at OLP of 10 dBm for the 50 km transmission span is ~5.97 dB. External modulation based frequency dithering (EMFD) exhibits ~3 dB of average SNR gain over DMFD method

Performance evaluation of digital pulse position modulation for wavelength division multiplexing FSO systems impaired by interchannel crosstalk

Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) has been proposed for fibre, intersatellite, free space and indoor optical communication systems. Digital pulse position modulation (DPPM) is a more power efficient modulation format than on-off keying (OOK) and a strong contender for the modulation of free-space systems. Although DPPM obtains this advantage in exchange for a bandwidth expansion, WDM systems using it are still potentially attractive, particularly for moderate coding levels. However, WDM systems are susceptible to interchannel crosstalk and modelling this in a WDM DPPM system is necessary. Models of varying complexity, based on simplifying assumptions, are presented and evaluated for the case of a single crosstalk wavelength. For a single crosstalk, results can be straightforwardly obtained by artificially imposing the computationally convenient constraint that frames (and thus slots also) align. Multiple crosstalk effects are additionally investigated, for the most practically relevant cases of modest coding level, and using both simulation and analytical methods. In general, DPPM maintains its sensitivity advantage over OOK even in the presence of crosstalk while predicting lower power penalty at low coding level in WDM systems