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Follow on Google News | Novel technique promises to speed up time from lab to product development for optical fibre systemsNew approach to testing optical communications systems is cost-effective and can reduce timescales to commercial exploitation of novel communications systems and software.
By: UNLOC Since their first commercial deployment in mid 1970s, communications systems using optical fibre cables as the main medium of data transmission have steadily become the underlying infrastructure facilitating the modern digital revolution. The recent surge in human and machine generated data collectively referred to as Big Data, cloud services and growing demand for live streaming of HD video are just some of the drives of technological innovations that constantly push the limits of optical communication system to accommodate the incessant growth in data volumes and hunger for more bandwidth. Scientists and engineers continuously have devised clever ways to manipulate various characteristics of light like amplitude, frequency and polarisation to fit ever more information within an optical fibre. But before any of these new techniques reaches the stage of commercial deployment, it needs to be extensively tested in laboratory and field experiments. While experimental investigation of modern complex communications systems is imperative for commercial deployments, it is slowly becoming too complex and expensive for R&D experiments. This usually results in prolonged laboratory testing phase before a new technology can advance to product development and commercial deployment. To address this, researchers from the UNLOC project (http://www.unloc.net/ Focus on simplicity Information from different sources is often encoded in and carried by light of different frequencies. Each of these form a channel and many channels are carried by a single optical fibre to their destination. Therefore, to evaluate the performance of a fibre link, a series of lasers each tuned to a different frequency (corresponding to a channel), and a set of modulators (devices used to encode the information onto the light carriers) are required to replicate a real transmission scenario. Ideally, communications experts are interested to investigate how transmission systems operate over a wide optical bandwidth in the presence of many, potentially interfering channels, which requires a large number of lasers and modulators to be set up for experiments. In the proposed technique, this large system of lasers and modulators is replaced by a single fibre amplifier with no input, which serves as a noise source. It turns out that this noise source responds in similar ways as a band of channels carrying actual signals to the nonlinear distortions introduced within optical fibres. This nonlinear behaviour is the main source of corruption of transmitted signals and data loss, and methods to transmit large amounts of data while minimising such distortions is the main focus of intensive research worldwide. The team proved that their input signal behaves statistically in the same way as a collection of real signals and for commonly used modulation formats like QPSK and 16QAM, the proposed technique can be used to characterise system performance in fibre links longer than few hundred kilometres. Subsequent system experiment confirmed this suggesting that in the future this approach can form the basis of next-generation, high-speed optical transmitters. “We hope that our work can ultimately enable and speed up the commercial development of next-generation wideband optical communications systems by reducing the complexity of laboratory facilities needed to investigate techniques to maximise optical fibre capacity.”- said Polina Bayvel, professor in Optical Fibre Communications at UCL and director of the UNLOC project. The research has been accepted for publication in Optics Letters and will appear in Vol.40, Issue 24 under the title “High Spectral Density Transmission Emulation Using ASE Noise as a Substitute for Nyquist-Spaced Channels”. MORE INFORMATION About UNLOC UNLOC is a 5 year project funded with £4.8 million by the EPSRC to explore theoretically and experimentally the current limits of optical fibre communications technology having a holistic, system-based approach, and device the next generation technologies that can expand the capacity of global fibre infrastructure. The project is led by researchers at UCL and Aston University and is supported by multiple industry partners among which are leaders in the commercial telecommunications arena like BT, Ciena, Google, Huawei. Orange Labs, Deutsche Telekom and more. About the EPSRC Industrial CASE award This research was conducted as part of a PhD studentship within the UNLOC project funded by the EPSRC Industrial CASE award withBBC R&D (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ CONTACT Research-related inquiries: Polina Bayvel Professor in Optical Fibre Communications & UNLOC Director EE Department, UCL Email: p.bayvel@ucl.ac.uk Tel: +442076797921 Media related inquiries: Iva Kostadinova UNLOC Communications Manager EE Department, UCL Email: i.kostadinova@ Tel: +442031084406 End
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