A survey on OFDM-based elastic core optical networking

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technology that has been widely adopted in many new and emerging broadband wireless and wireline communication systems. Due to its capability to transmit a high-speed data stream using multiple spectral-overlapped lower-speed subcarriers, OFDM technology offers superior advantages of high spectrum efficiency, robustness against inter-carrier and inter-symbol interference, adaptability to server channel conditions, etc. In recent years, there have been intensive studies on optical OFDM (O-OFDM) transmission technologies, and it is considered a promising technology for future ultra-high-speed optical transmission. Based on O-OFDM technology, a novel elastic optical network architecture with immense flexibility and scalability in spectrum allocation and data rate accommodation could be built to support diverse services and the rapid growth of Internet traffic in the future. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on OFDM-based elastic optical network technologies, including basic principles of OFDM, O-OFDM technologies, the architectures of OFDM-based elastic core optical networks, and related key enabling technologies. The main advantages and issues of OFDM-based elastic core optical networks that are under research are also discussed

Soft-Decision-Driven Channel Estimation for Pipelined Turbo Receivers

We consider channel estimation specific to turbo equalization for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication. We develop a soft-decision-driven sequential algorithm geared to the pipelined turbo equalizer architecture operating on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols. One interesting feature of the pipelined turbo equalizer is that multiple soft-decisions become available at various processing stages. A tricky issue is that these multiple decisions from different pipeline stages have varying levels of reliability. This paper establishes an effective strategy for the channel estimator to track the target channel, while dealing with observation sets with different qualities. The resulting algorithm is basically a linear sequential estimation algorithm and, as such, is Kalman-based in nature. The main difference here, however, is that the proposed algorithm employs puncturing on observation samples to effectively deal with the inherent correlation among the multiple demapper/decoder module outputs that cannot easily be removed by the traditional innovations approach. The proposed algorithm continuously monitors the quality of the feedback decisions and incorporates it in the channel estimation process. The proposed channel estimation scheme shows clear performance advantages relative to existing channel estimation techniques.Comment: 11 pages; IEEE Transactions on Communications 201

Communication Subsystems for Emerging Wireless Technologies

The paper describes a multi-disciplinary design of modern communication systems. The design starts with the analysis of a system in order to define requirements on its individual components. The design exploits proper models of communication channels to adapt the systems to expected transmission conditions. Input filtering of signals both in the frequency domain and in the spatial domain is ensured by a properly designed antenna. Further signal processing (amplification and further filtering) is done by electronics circuits. Finally, signal processing techniques are applied to yield information about current properties of frequency spectrum and to distribute the transmission over free subcarrier channels