Nonlinear limits to the information capacity of optical fibre communications

By Partha P. Mitra, J. Stark. Nature, 2000

703 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The exponential growth in the rate at which information can be communicated through an optical fibre is a key element in the ‘information revolution’. However, as for all exponential growth laws, physical limits must be considered. The nonlinear nature of the propagation of light in optical fibre has made these limits difficult to elucidate. Here we use a key simplification to investigate the theoretical limits to the information capacity of an optical fibre arising from these nonlinearities. The success of our approach lies in relating the nonlinear channel to a linear channel with multiplicative noise, for which we are able to obtain analytical results. In fundamental distinction to linear channels with additive noise, the capacity of a nonlinear channel does not grow indefinitely with increasing signal power, but has a maximal value. The ideas presented here may have broader implications for other nonlinear information channels, such as those involved in sensory transduction in neurobiology. These have been often examined using additive noise linear channel models but, as we show here, nonlinearities can change the picture qualitatively.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dca4c573f5eccbdfe300563986c2f57e099101e6

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Citations in the corpus

Spectral efficiency limits and modulation/detection techniques for DWDM systems (2004, methodology): “propagation regimes (linear or nonlinear [9], [10]).”
Wavelength-scalable hollow optical fibres with large photonic bandgaps for CO2 laser transmission (2002, background): “However, all fibres that rely on light propagation principally through a solid material have certain fundamental limitations stemming from nonlinear effects, light absorption by electrons or phonons, material dispersion and Rayleigh scattering that limit maximum optical transmission power and increa”
Linear Propagation Effects in Mode-Division Multiplexing Systems (2014, background): “These systems are fundamentally limited only by optical amplifier noise and fiber nonlinearities [6]–[8].”
Statistics of Group Delays in Multimode Fiber With Strong Mode Coupling (2011, background): “because of limits posed by optical amplifier noise and fiber nonlinearity [15], [16].”
Capacity Limits of Optical Fiber Networks (2010, background): “noise [59], [60], [62], while others are limited to specific”
Recent advances in coherent optical communication (2009, methodology): “It would be interesting to obtain a lower bound on the practical capacity limits as a function ofADC resolution and step size by using the semianalytical method as in [ 62 ].ADC resolution and step size (proportional to number of operations) both affect system cost.”
Optical frequency comb technology for ultra‐broadband radio‐frequency photonics (2014, background): “This limit is fundamentally imposed by the noise of the amplifiers and the inherent nonlinearities and losses in single-mode fiber [145].”