Evolving Optical Networks for Latency-Sensitive Smart-Grid Communications via Optical Time Slice Switching (OTSS) Technologies

In this paper, we proposed a novel OTSS-assisted optical network architecture for smart-grid communication networks, which has unique requirements for low-latency connections. Illustrative results show that, OTSS can provide extremely better performance in latency and blocking probability than conventional flexi-grid optical networks.Comment: IEEE Photonics Society 1st Place Best Poster Award, on CLEO-PR/OECC/PGC 201

Ethernet - a survey on its fields of application

During the last decades, Ethernet progressively became the most widely used local area networking (LAN) technology. Apart from LAN installations, Ethernet became also attractive for many other fields of application, ranging from industry to avionics, telecommunication, and multimedia. The expanded application of this technology is mainly due to its significant assets like reduced cost, backward-compatibility, flexibility, and expandability. However, this new trend raises some problems concerning the services of the protocol and the requirements for each application. Therefore, specific adaptations prove essential to integrate this communication technology in each field of application. Our primary objective is to show how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the specific requirements of several application fields, particularly in transport, embedded and multimedia contexts. The paper first describes the common Ethernet LAN technology and highlights its main features. It reviews the most important specific Ethernet versions with respect to each application field’s requirements. Finally, we compare these different fields of application and we particularly focus on the fundamental concepts and the quality of service capabilities of each proposal

Speeding up liquid crystal SLMs using overdrive with phase change reduction

Nematic liquid crystal spatial light modulators (SLMs) with fast switching times and high diffraction efficiency are important to various applications ranging from optical beam steering and adaptive optics to optical tweezers. Here we demonstrate the great benefits that can be derived in terms of speed enhancement without loss of diffraction efficiency from two mutually compatible approaches. The first technique involves the idea of overdrive, that is the calculation of intermediate patterns to speed up the transition to the target phase pattern. The second concerns optimization of the target pattern to reduce the required phase change applied to each pixel, which in addition leads to a substantial reduction of variations in the intensity of the diffracted light during the transition. When these methods are applied together, we observe transition times for the diffracted light fields of about 1 ms, which represents up to a tenfold improvement over current approaches. We experimentally demonstrate the improvements of the approach for applications such as holographic image projection, beam steering and switching, and real-time control loops