New optical fibres for high-capacity optical communications
Professor David Richardson FREng, University of Southampton, UK
Abstract
For the past 30 years communications research has focused on finding innovative ways of coding and multiplexing optical signals to unlock the maximum practical ~10Tbit/s/Hz spectral efficiency provided by single-mode optical fibre. However, cost-effective future scaling of network capacity may ultimately benefit from fibre solutions that can exploit multiple spatial modes within a single multimode-core, and/or multiple cores incorporated within the fibre cross-section to increase the per-fibre spectral efficiency. This talk will review progress towards realizing these new fibre types (along with the key component/subsystems required) and describe the necessary requirements for ultimate commercial deployment.
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Professor David Richardson FREng, University of Southampton, UK
Professor David Richardson FREng, University of Southampton, UK
David Richardson joined the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at Southampton University as a Research Fellow in May 1989 and was awarded a Royal Society University Fellowship in 1991 in recognition of his pioneering work on short pulse fibre lasers. Professor Richardson has been Deputy Director of the ORC with responsibility for fibre and laser related research since 2000. His current research interests include amongst others: optical communications, microstructured optical fibres and high-power fibre lasers. He has published >350 journal papers and produced > 20 patents. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Engineering and Technology and was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2009. He is currently a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award holder. Professor Richardson was one of the co-founders of SPI Lasers Ltd an ORC spin-off venture acquired by the Trumpf Group in 2008.
The benefits of convergence
Professor Gee-Kung Chang, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Abstract
We envision a versatile, multi-tier radio access technology that combines the strength of optical and wireless access networks using integrated microwave photonics and radio over fibre techniques for wireless data signal generation, transport and processing in a converged network architecture. All radio spectrum from 0.1 GHz to 100 GHz will be used to deliver multi-service with high capacity, low latency, carrier aggregation, resource sharing and management for heterogeneous mobile communications.
The integrated fibre wireless access network architecture will harness higher bandwidth efficiency through both provisioning frequency reuse and operating at higher frequency bands. Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) and multi-tier cell transmission and joint signal processing are needed to eliminate throughput bottleneck at the cell-edge in an integrated 4G and 5G system platform. The main goals of the converged optical and wireless access network is to manage and allocate varied network resources in real time (< 1ms) to maintain balanced network throughput while taking into account physical-layer connectivity constraints regardless of the underlying network topology by abstracting network nodes into shared, selectable, virtual functional blocks that includes wavelength, time scheduling, RF/mmW channel frequency and bandwidth, carrier aggregation and scheduling, latency, virtual resource status map through coordinated real-time communications. Agility and resource sharing in such aggregated physical scheme are the key to provide physical layer agnostic interfaces and network function virtulization. The benefits harvested from this new converged network architecture can meet the challenges in system scalability for capacity, wireless link speed, while overcoming the bandwidth crunch for next generation communication networks.
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Professor Gee-Kung Chang, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Professor Gee-Kung Chang, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Professor Gee-Kung Chang is the Georgia Research Alliance and Byers Eminent Scholar Chair Professor of Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the Director of Georgia Tech Center for Fiber Wireless Integration and Networking and Co-Director of Terabit Networking Center.
He received a BS degree in Physics from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan and a Ph.D. degree in Physics from the University of California, Riverside. He served a total of 23 years at Bell Labs, Bellcore, and Telcordia Technologies, including latterly as the Director and Chief Scientist of Next Generation Internet Research. He was the Chief Technology Strategist of OpNext, in charge of technology planning for optoelectronic systems. He has been granted 56 patents and co-authored 500 peer-reviewed journals and conference papers. He is a fellow of the IEEE, OSA, and Telcordia Technologies. He served as the lead guest editor of four special issues of the Journal of Lightwave Technology.
Maximising the optical network capacity
Professor Polina Bayvel FREng, University College London, UK
Abstract
Most of the digital data is carried by optical fibres, forming the great part of the national and international communication infrastructure. The information carrying capacity of these networks has increased through wavelength division multiplexing, advanced modulation formats, digital signal processing and improved optical fibre and amplifier technology. This sparked the communication revolution and the growth of the Internet, and created an illusion of infinite capacity being available. But as the amounts of data increase, is there a limit to the capacity of an optical fibre communication channel? The optical fibre channel is nonlinear, and the intensity-dependent Kerr nonlinearity limit, sometimes called the nonlinear Shannon limit, has been suggested as a fundamental limit to optical fibre capacity. There has been much debate as to whether this is too pessimistic. Current research is focused on finding linear and nonlinear techniques, both optical and electronic, to understand, unlock and maximise the capacity of optical communications in the nonlinear regime. This talk will describe some of them and discuss future prospects for success in this area.
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Professor Polina Bayvel FREng, University College London, UK
Professor Polina Bayvel FREng, University College London, UK
Polina Bayvel FREng is Professor of Optical Communications and Networks, and Head of the Optical Networks Group (ONG) at University College London. Formerly a Royal Society University Research Fellow (1993-2003), her research has focused on the design of optical networks, high-speed optical fibre transmission and the study and mitigation of optical fibre nonlinearities using a variety of signal processing techniques. She heads the Optical Networks Group at UCL, which she founded, now a world-leading research laboratory undertaking systems engineering research in optical communication systems and networks. She was one of the first to show the feasibility of using the wavelength domain for routing in optical networks, and designed wavelength-selective devices needed for their characterisation and implementation. She was awarded the 2014 Royal Society Clifford Paterson Lecture & Medal for her fundamental research in high bandwidth digital communications and nonlinear optics, and 2013 IEEE Photonics Society Engineering Achievement Award for seminal advances in optical networks, including efficient wavelength routing architectures and electronic DSP algorithms to mitigate data degrading effects. She currently leads the EPSRC UNLOC programme – unlocking the capacity of optical communications, aimed at maximising the capacity of optical networks in the nonlinear regime, in collaboration with Aston University and numerous industrial partners.
Physical limitations to network capacity
Dr René Essiambre, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
Abstract
In the last three decades, the maximum rate of transmission of information, or capacity, demonstrated over single-mode fibres has increased by an astonishing four orders of magnitude. In the last few years however, experimental demonstrations of fibre capacity seem to show capacity saturation just above 100 Tbits/s for 10 THz of amplification bandwidth. This transmission rate corresponds to approximately half the current nonlinear fibre capacity limit estimate of single-mode fibres over the same bandwidth. To achieve further progress, it is important to understand the physical effects and associated degradation mechanisms that can lead to capacity limitations in future fibre-optic communication systems. Furthermore, the role of fibre design on ultimate fibre capacity and the potential of novel transmission fibres, including fibres supporting multiple spatial modes, to increase capacity per fibre strand need to be considered.
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Dr René Essiambre, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
Dr René Essiambre, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
René-Jean Essiambre studied at McGill University in Montréal and Université Laval in Québec City, Canada from which he received a Ph.D. degree in Physics (Optics) in 1994. From 1995 to 1997, he was at The Institute of Optics of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA. Since 1997, he has been at Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, Holmdel, New Jersey, USA. His current research interests include nonlinear dynamics in optical fibers,information theory applied to fiber-optic communication systems and space-division multiplexing in multimode and multicore fibers for high-capacity transmission. He is the author and coauthor of more than 150 scientific publications and several book chapters. He has served on or chaired many conference subcommittees including ECOC, OFC, CLEO, and LEOS and is the Program Co-Chair of CLEO: Science & Innovations 2012 and General Chair for 2014. Dr. Essiambre is a Fellow of both the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is the recipient of the 2005 OSA Engineering Excellence Award and is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) at Bell Laboratories.