Study
shows fiber has room to grow
By
Kimberly Patch,
Technology Research NewsAlthough fiber optic lines have been in commercial use for many years, their top theoretical capacities have always remained rather murky. This is because many optical signals of slightly different frequencies, or colors, can flow over one fiber at once, and it's difficult to predict the effect of the different frequencies interfering with each other.
A pair of researchers from Lucent Technologies' Bell Lab has simplified the problem in order to make a prediction. Their method shows that fiber capacities can theoretically increase by an order of magnitude over today's fastest links. The method may also provide insight into the way biological eyes work.
When a string of signals traverses a communications channel made of wire, the signals fade in a mathematically predictable way, slowly degraded by random noise. In optical fiber, however, the noise is due to crosstalk from other channels. Instead of having an additive, or linear effect, the various crosstalk noise signals interact, changing the signal pulses in more complicated ways.
This cocktail party environment, which randomly changes the speed of various parts of the signals, has historically proven difficult to predict. "The expected output when two [signals] are simultaneously present is not the sum of the expected outputs when the signals are transmitted individually," said Partha Mitra, a physicist at Bell Labs.
The researchers came up with a way to characterize the effect mathematically by changing the problem into one that was linear and could therefore be worked out. They essentially calculated the multiplicative effects of crosstalk on a linear signal. "The actual set of ideas we used in the paper emerged through discussion of what happens to a set of initially monochromatic beams propagating through the fiber in the presence of a background of... channels," said Mitra.
"The nonlinearities caused the crosstalk. The effect of the crosstalk is to randomly modulate the propagation speed of the channel. The simplification we made... was to [use] a linear channel, but one that [was modulated in complicated ways] due to the information being carried by the other... channels," he said.
This simplification made it possible for the researchers to estimate the peak spectral efficiency of fiber, which in turn allowed them to estimate its top capacity based on today's top bandwidths and how far the information needs to travel. Spectral efficiency is a measure of the top speed that pulses, or bits of information, can travel down a fiber-optic line, divided by the amount of wavelength space between the optical information channels that carry slightly different colors of light.
According the researchers' calculations, it is theoretically possible to put more than an order of magnitude more information through existing lines before running into physical limits due to crosstalk. "The peak spectral efficiency from normal fiber is three bits per second per hertz," or wavelength cycle, said Mitra. "This leads to a capacity estimate of 150 terabits per second."
Today's fiber lines have a top capacity of about 1.6 terabits of information per second using 160 channels in a single fiber; speeds of ten terabits per second have been demonstrated in the laboratory.
The trick to sending more information over fiber lines is striking a balance in signal power. The more powerful a signal is, the less likely it is to degrade quickly, but the more likely it is to produce crosstalk. This is very different from sending information over a wire line, where boosting the power simply increases the time it will be able to travel before degrading.
Because our eyes are essentially lightwave sensors, they encounter some of the same issues; scientists looking into the way vision systems work could also benefit from the crosstalk calculations, said Mitra. "That research will benefit from better understanding of the qualitatively new effects that arise from having nonlinearities in the channel, which, needless to say, are present in the nervous system," he said.
Considering the effect of fiber nonlinearities is something that has not been done before and is very useful, said Amnon Yariv, a professor of applied physics, engineering and applied science at at the California Institute of Technology. "The common wisdom is that when one elevates the signal power one can propagate farther or increase [the] data rate for the same distance. This is not true at the power levels employed today and the practical implications are very important," he said.
The researchers are now working on designing more efficient systems based on the research. "Our next step is to use the increased understanding to design better systems, for example with higher spectral efficiencies, or to use the available phase space to optimize [something else]," he said.
The research could have an immediate impact in terms of how people think about designing systems that propagate optical signals, said Mitra. "I think it will lead to better understanding of modulation and coding schemes. In practical terms, it means that optical fibers are a good way to build scalable networks, because the capacities can be increased substantially by adding appropriate equipment," he said. It's technically possible to make substantial progress towards the ultimate in spectral efficiencies "on a several year time scale," he added.
Mitra's research colleague was Jason B. Stark. They published the research in the June 28, 2001 issue of the journal Nature. The research was funded by Bell Labs.
Timeline: Now; 3-5 years
Funding: Corporate
TRN Categories: Optical Computing, Optoelectronics and Photonics; Networking
Story Type: News
Related Elements: Technical paper, "Nonlinear Limits to the Information Capacity of Optical Fiber Communications," Nature, June 28, 2001.
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August 1/8, 2001
Page One
Tool reads quantum bits
Study shows fiber has room to grow
Search tool builds encyclopedia
Positioned atoms advance quantum chips
Electron beam welds nanotubes
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