Capacity Limits of Optical Fiber Networks

By René-Jean Essiambre, Gerhard Kramer, Peter J. Winzer, Gerard J. Foschini, Bernhard Goebel. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 2010

2,243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe a method to estimate the capacity limit of fiber-optic communication systems (or ¿fiber channels¿) based on information theory. This paper is divided into two parts. Part 1 reviews fundamental concepts of digital communications and information theory. We treat digitization and modulation followed by information theory for channels both without and with memory. We provide explicit relationships between the commonly used signal-to-noise ratio and the optical signal-to-noise ratio. We further evaluate the performance of modulation constellations such as quadrature-amplitude modulation, combinations of amplitude-shift keying and phase-shift keying, exotic constellations, and concentric rings for an additive white Gaussian noise channel using coherent detection. Part 2 is devoted specifically to the "fiber channel.'' We review the physical phenomena present in transmission over optical fiber networks, including sources of noise, the need for optical filtering in optically-routed networks, and, most critically, the presence of fiber Kerr nonlinearity. We describe various transmission scenarios and impairment mitigation techniques, and define a fiber channel deemed to be the most relevant for communication over optically-routed networks. We proceed to evaluate a capacity limit estimate for this fiber channel using ring constellations. Several scenarios are considered, including uniform and optimized ring constellations, different fiber dispersion maps, and varying transmission distances. We further present evidences that point to the physical origin of the fiber capacity limitations and provide a comparison of recent record experiments with our capacity limit estimation.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a6e9528391ee823879a204857f47b6b490744755

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Citations in the corpus

Capacity Trends and Limits of Optical Communication Networks (2012, methodology): “We can also express the SE as a function of SNR b to first order in SNR b as”
Flexible architectures for optical transport nodes and networks (2010, background): “Since an increase in spectral efficiency of the modulation format requires an exponential increase in SNR [ 18 ] it is not likely that channels with data rates beyond 100 Gb/s will be designed with a 50 GHz channel spacing for long-haul network transmission distances.”
Space-division multiplexed transmission over 4200-km 3-core microstructured fiber (2012, background): “Introduction The knowledge of an impending nonlinear capacity limit of single-mode fiber [1] has sparked a renewed interest in spatial multiplexing over multicore [2], multimode [3], and microstructured fibers [4].”
High-Spectral-Efficiency Optical Modulation Formats (2012, background): “6(a) visualizes this trade-off in the linear regime, showing the achievable (single-polarization) spectral efficiency as a function of the received SNR per bit [28], [33].”
End-to-End Energy Modeling and Analysis of Long-Haul Coherent Transmission Systems (2014, methodology): “The Rx SNR per bit for the polarization multiplexed system is calculated as SNRbit = 2B0osnroutsysm syso/(RBr), where sysm and syso correspond to the non-linear system margin and system margin due to other factors, respectively [56].”
From Scaling Disparities to Integrated Parallelism: A Decathlon for a Decade (2017, background): “tems, as WDM systems are closely approaching their respective Shannon limits [69], [70] while optical amplifier bandwidths have remained fixed.”
Conservation of orbital angular momentum in air core optical fibers (2014, background): “proposed such waveguides [6], and experimental work has claimed OAM propagation over cmlengths [7].”
Nonlinear Shannon Limit in Pseudolinear Coherent Systems (2012, methodology): “However, using a distribution of levels different from a Gaussian, the formula for the capacity in the presence of a Gaussian noise is not the Shannon formula, but the modified one presented in [2].”
Characterization of Crosstalk in Ultra-Low-Crosstalk Multi-Core Fiber (2012, background): “D EMAND for transmission capacity is increasing exponentially, and rapidly approaching its fundamental limit [1].”
Nonlinear Propagation in Multimode and Multicore Fibers: Generalization of the Manakov Equations (2012, neutral): “Figure 1 shows the bit-error rate (BER) averaged over all the propagating spatial modes as a function of the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) [1] after 1000 km multimode fiber when 114-Gb/s bit streams are transmitted on different combinations of spatial modes.”
OFDM for Next-Generation Optical Access Networks (2012, background): “However, with the explosive, multimedia-driven growth of Internet traffic [24], it became evident that: 1) unless fiber bandwidth was used more efficiently, the operational spectrum range of optical amplifiers would be exceeded [25], [26]; and 2) that the fiber channel itself imposes fundamental cap”