IT IS generally believed by the research community that the introduction of complex
network functions—such as routing—in the optical domain will allow a better network
utilisation, lower cost and footprint, and a more efficiency in energy usage. The new optical
components and sub-systems intended for dynamic optical networking introduce
new kinds of physical layer impairments in the optical signal, and it is of paramount
importance to overcome this problem if dynamic optical networks should become a
reality. Thus, the aim of this thesis was to first identify and characterise the physical
layer impairments of dynamic optical networks, and then digital signal processing
techniques were developed to mitigate them.
The initial focus of this work was the design and characterisation of digital optical
receivers for dynamic core optical networks. Digital receiver techniques allow for complex
algorithms to be implemented in the digital domain, which usually outperform
their analogue counterparts in performance and flexibility. An AC-coupled digital receiver
for core networks—consisting of a standard PIN photodiode and a digitiser that
takes samples at twice the Nyquist rate—was characterised in terms of both bit-error
rate and packet-error rate, and it is shown that the packet-error rate can be optimised by
appropriately setting the preamble length. Also, a realistic model of a digital receiver
that includes the quantisation impairments was developed. Finally, the influence of
the network load and the traffic sparsity on the packet-error rate performance of the
receiver was investigated.
Digital receiver technologies can be equally applied to optical access networks,
which share many traits with dynamic core networks. A dual-rate digital receiver, capable
of detecting optical packets at 10 and 1.25 Gb/s, was developed and characterised.
The receiver dynamic range was extended by means of DC-coupling and non-linear
signal clipping, and it is shown that the receiver performance is limited by digitiser
noise for low received power and non-linear clipping for high received power