Fiber-optic communication

    Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending light through an optical fiber. The light forms an electromagnetic carrier wave that is modulated to carry information. First developed in the 1970s, fiber-optic communication systems have revolutionized the telecommunications industry and played a major role in the advent of the Information Age. Because of its advantages over electrical transmission, the use of optical fiber has largely replaced copper wire communications in core networks in the developed world.

The process of communicating using fiber-optics involves the following basic steps: Creating the optical signal using a transmitter, relaying the signal along the fiber, ensuring that the signal does not become too distorted or weak, and receiving the optical signal and converting it into an electrical signal.

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Applications

Optical fiber is used by many telecommunications companies to transmit telephone signals, Internet communication, and cable television signals. Due to much lower attenuation and interference, optical fiber has large advantages over existing copper wire in long-distance and high-demand applications. However, infrastructure development within cities was relatively difficult and time-consuming, and fiber-optic systems were complex and expensive to install and operate. Due to these difficulties, fiber-optic communication systems have primarily been installed in long-distance applications, where they can be used to their full transmission capacity, offsetting the increased cost. Since the year 2000, the prices for fiber-optic communications have dropped considerably. The price for rolling out fiber to the home has currently become more cost-effective than that of rolling out a copper based network. Prices have dropped to $850 per subscriber in the US and lower in countries like The Netherlands, where digging costs are low.

Since 1990, when optical-amplification systems became commercially available, the telecommunications industry has laid a vast network of intercity and transoceanic fiber communication lines. By 2002, an intercontinental network of 250,000 km of submarine communications cable with a capacity of 2.56 Tb/s was completed, and although specific network capacities are privileged information, telecommunications investment reports indicate that network capacity has increased dramatically since 2002.

History

  The need for reliable long-distance communication systems has existed since antiquity. Over time, the sophistication of these systems has gradually improved, from smoke signals to telegraphs and finally to the first coaxial cable, put into service in 1940. As these communication systems improved, certain fundamental limitations presented themselves. Electrical systems were limited by their small repeater spacing (the distance a signal can propagate before attenuation requires the signal to be amplified), and the bit rate of microwave systems was limited by their carrier frequency. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was realized that an optical carrier of information would have a significant advantage over the existing electrical and microwave carrier signals.

However, no coherent light source or suitable transmission medium was available. Then, after the development of lasers in the 1960s solved the first problem, development of high-quality optical fiber was proposed as a solution to the second. Optical fiber was finally developed in 1970 by Corning Glass Works with attenuation low enough for communication purposes (about 20dB/km), and at the same time GaAs semiconductor lasers were developed that were compact and therefore suitable for fiber-optic communication systems.

After a period of intensive research from 1975 to 1980, the first commercial fiber-optic communication system was developed, which operated at a wavelength around 0.8 µm and used GaAs semiconductor lasers. This first generation system operated at a bit rate of 45 Mbit/s with repeater spacing of up to 10 km.

On 22 April, 1977, General Telephone and Electronics sent the first live telephone traffic through fiber optics, at 6 Mbit/s, in Long Beach, California.

The second generation of fiber-optic communication was developed for commercial use in the early 1980s, operated at 1.3 µm, and used InGaAsP semiconductor lasers. Although these systems were initially limited by dispersion, in 1981 the single-mode fiber was revealed to greatly improve system performance. By 1987, these systems were operating at bit rates of up to 1.7 Gb/s with repeater spacing up to 50 km.

The first transatlantic telephone cable to use optical fiber was TAT-8, based on Desurvire optimized laser amplification technology. It went into operation in 1988.

TAT-8 was developed as the first undersea fiber optic link between the United States and Europe. TAT-8 is more than 3000 nautical miles in length and was the first transatlantic cable to use optical fibers. It was designed to handle a mix of information. When inaugurated, it had an estimated lifetime in excess of 20 years. TAT-8 was the first of a new class of cables, even though it had already been used in long-distance land and short-distance undersea operations. Its installation was preceded by extensive deep-water experiments and trials conducted in the early 1980s to demonstrate the project's feasibility.

Third-generation fiber-optic systems operated at 1.55 µm and had loss of about 0.2 dB/km. They achieved this despite earlier difficulties with pulse-spreading at that wavelength using conventional InGaAsP semiconductor lasers. Scientists overcame this difficulty by using dispersion-shifted fibers designed to have minimal dispersion at 1.55 µm or by limiting the laser spectrum to a single longitudinal mode. These developments eventually allowed 3rd generation systems to operate commercially at 2.5 Gbit/s with repeater spacing in excess of 100 km.

The fourth generation of fiber-optic communication systems used optical amplification to reduce the need for repeaters and wavelength-division multiplexing to increase fiber capacity. These two improvements caused a revolution that resulted in the doubling of system capacity every 6 months starting in 1992 until a bit rate of 10 Tb/s was reached by 2001. Recently, bit-rates of up to 14 Tbit/s have been reached over a single 160 km line using optical amplifiers.

The focus of development for the fifth generation of fiber-optic communications is on extending the wavelength range over which a WDM system can operate. The conventional wavelength window, known as the C band, covers the wavelength range 1.53-1.57 µm, and the new dry fiber has a low-loss window promising an extension of that range to 1.30 to 1.65 µm. Other developments include the concept of "optical solitons, " pulses that preserve their shape by counteracting the effects of dispersion with the nonlinear effects of the fiber by using pulses of a specific shape.

In the late 1990s through 2000, the fiber optic communication industry became associated with the dot-com bubble. Industry promoters, and research companies such as KMI and RHK predicted vast increases in demand for communications bandwidth due to increased use of the Internet, and commercialization of various bandwidth-intensive consumer services, such as video on demand. Internet protocol data traffic was said to be increasing exponentially, and at a faster rate than integrated circuit complexity had increased under Moore's Law. From the bust of the dot-com bubble through 2006, however, the main trend in the industry has been consolidation of firms and offshoring of manufacturing to reduce costs.

Technology

Modern fiber-optic communication systems generally include an optical transmitter to convert an electrical signal into an optical signal to send into the optical fiber, a cable containing bundles of multiple optical fibers that is routed through underground conduits and buildings, multiple kinds of amplifiers, and an optical receiver to recover the signal as an electrical signal. The information transmitted is typically digital information generated by computers, telephone systems, and cable television companies.

Transmitters

The most commonly-used optical transmitters are semiconductor devices such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes. The difference between LEDs and laser diodes is that LEDs produce incoherent light, while laser diodes produce coherent light. For use in optical communications, semiconductor optical transmitters must be designed to be compact, efficient, and reliable, while operating in an optimal wavelength range, and directly modulated at high frequencies.

In its simplest form, an LED is a forward-biased p-n junction, emitting light through spontaneous emission, a phenomenon referred to as electroluminescence. The emitted light is incoherent with a relatively wide spectral width of 30-60 nm. LED light transmission is also inefficient, with only about 1 % of input power, or about 100 microwatts, eventually converted into «launched power» which has been coupled into the optical fiber. However, due to their relatively simple design, LEDs are very useful for low-cost applications.

Communications LEDs are most commonly made from gallium arsenide phosphide (GaAsP) or gallium arsenide (GaAs). Because GaAsP LEDs operate at a longer wavelength than GaAs LEDs (1.3 micrometers vs. 0.81-0.87 micrometers), their output spectrum is wider by a factor of about 1.7. The large spectrum width of LEDs causes higher fiber dispersion, considerably limiting their bit rate-distance product (a common measure of usefulness). LEDs are suitable primarily for local-area-network applications with bit rates of 10-100 Mbit/s and transmission distances of a few kilometers. LEDs have also been developed that use several quantum wells to emit light at different wavelengths over a broad spectrum, and are currently in use for local-area WDM networks.

A semiconductor laser emits light through stimulated emission rather than spontaneous emission, which results in high output power (~100 mW) as well as other benefits related to the nature of coherent light. The output of a laser is relatively directional, allowing high coupling efficiency (~50 %) into single-mode fiber. The narrow spectral width also allows for high bit rates since it reduces the effect of chromatic dispersion. Furthermore, semiconductor lasers can be modulated directly at high frequencies because of short recombination time.

Laser diodes are often directly modulated, that is the light output is controlled by a current applied directly to the device. For very high data rates or very long distance links, a laser source may be operated continuous wave, and the light modulated by an external device such as an electroabsorption modulator or Mach-Zehnder interferometer. External modulation increases the achievable link distance by eliminating laser chirp, which broadens the linewidth of directly-modulated lasers, increasing the chromatic dispersion in the fiber.

Fiber

Main article: Optical fiber

Optical fiber consists of a core, cladding, and a protective outer coating, which guides light along the core by total internal reflection. The core, and the lower-refractive-index cladding, are typically made of high-quality silica glass, though they can both be made of plastic as well. An optical fiber can break if bent too sharply. Due to the microscopic precision required to align the fiber cores, connecting two optical fibers, whether done by fusion splicing or mechanical splicing, requires special skills and interconnection technology.^[1].

Two main categories of optical fiber used in fiber optic communications are multi-mode optical fiber and single-mode optical fiber. Multimode fiber has a larger core (≥ 50 micrometres), allowing less precise, cheaper transmitters and receivers to connect to it as well as cheaper connectors. However, multi-mode fiber introduces multimode distortion which often limits the bandwidth and length of the link. Furthermore, because of its higher dopant content, multimode fiber is usually more expensive and exhibits higher attenuation. Single-mode fiber’s smaller core (<10 micrometres) necessitates more expensive components and interconnection methods, but allows much longer, higher-performance links.

In order to package fiber into a commercially-viable product, it is protectively-coated, typically by using ultraviolet (UV) light-cured acrylate polymers, terminated with optical fiber connectors, and assembled into a cable. It can then be laid in the ground, run through a building or deployed aerially in a manner similar to copper cable. Once deployed, such cables require substantially less maintenance than copper cable. [1]

Amplifiers

Main article: Optical amplifier

The transmission distance of a fiber-optic communication system has traditionally been limited primarily by fiber attenuation and second by fiber distortion. The solution to this has been to use opto-electronic repeaters. These repeaters first convert the signal to an electrical signal then use a transmitter to send the signal again at a higher intensity. Because of their high complexity, especially with modern wavelength-division multiplexed signals, and the fact that they had to be installed about once every 20 km, the cost for these repeaters was very high.

An alternative approach is to use an optical amplifier, which amplifies the optical signal directly without having to convert the signal into the electrical domain. Made by doping a length of fiber with the rare-earth mineral erbium, and pumping it with light from a laser with a shorter wavelength than the communications signal (typically 980 nm), amplifiers have largely replaced repeaters in new installations.

Receivers

The main component of an optical receiver is a photodetector that converts light into electricity through the photoelectric effect. The photodetector is typically a semiconductor-based photodiode, such as a p-n photodiode, a p-i-n photodiode, or an avalanche photodiode. Metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) photodetectors are also used due to their suitability for circuit integration in regenerators and wavelength-division multiplexers.

The optical-electrical converters is typically coupled with a transimpedance amplifier and limiting amplifier to produce a digital signal in the electrical domain from the incoming optical signal, which may be attenuated and distorted by passing through the channel. Further signal processing such as clock recovery from data (CDR) by a phase-locked loop may also be applied before the data is passed on.

Wavelength-division multiplexing

Main article: Wavelength-division multiplexing

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) is the practice of dividing the wavelength capacity of an optical fiber into multiple channels in order to send more than one signal over the same fiber. This requires a wavelength division multiplexer in the transmitting equipment and a wavelength division demultiplexer (essentially a spectrometer) in the receiving equipment. Arrayed waveguide gratings are commonly used for multiplexing and demultiplexing in WDM. Using WDM technology now commercially available, the bandwidth of a fiber can be divided into as many as 80 channels to support a combined bit rate into the range of terabits per second.

Bandwidth-distance product

Because the effect of dispersion increases with the length of the fiber, a fiber transmission system is often characterized by its bandwidth-distance product, often expressed in units of MHz×km. This value is a product of bandwidth and distance because there is a trade off between the bandwidth of the signal and the distance it can be carried. For example, a common multimode fiber with bandwidth-distance product of 500 MHz×km could carry a 500 MHz signal for 1 km or a 1000 MHz signal for 0.5 km.

Through a combination of advances in dispersion management, wavelength-division multiplexing, and optical amplifiers, modern-day optical fibers can carry information at around 14 Terabits per second over 160 kilometers of fiber ^[2]. Engineers are always looking at current limitations in order to improve fiber-optic communication, and several of these restrictions are currently being researched:

Dispersion

For modern glass optical fiber, the maximum transmission distance is limited not by attenuation but by dispersion, or spreading of optical pulses as they travel along the fiber. Dispersion in optical fibers is caused by a variety of factors. Intermodal dispersion, caused by the different axial speeds of different transverse modes, limits the performance of multi-mode fiber. Because single-mode fiber supports only one transverse mode, intermodal dispersion is eliminated.

In single-mode fiber performance is primarily limited by chromatic dispersion (also called group velocity dispersion), which occurs because the index of the glass varies slightly depending on the wavelength of the light, and light from real optical transmitters necessarily has nonzero spectral width (due to modulation). Polarization mode dispersion, another source of limitation, occurs because although the single-mode fiber can sustain only one transverse mode, it can carry this mode with two different polarizations, and slight imperfections or distortions in a fiber can alter the propagation velocities for the two polarizations. This phenomenon is called fiber birefringence and can be counteracted by polarization-maintaining optical fiber. Dispersion limits the bandwidth of the fiber because the spreading optical pulse limits the rate that pulses can follow one another on the fiber and still be distinguishable at the receiver.

Some dispersion, notably chromatic dispersion, can be removed by a 'dispersion compensator'. This works by using a specially prepared length of fiber that has the opposite dispersion to that induced by the transmission fiber, and this sharpens the pulse so that it can be correctly decoded by the electronics.

Attenuation

Fiber attenuation, which necessitates the use of amplification systems, is caused by a combination of material absorption, Rayleigh scattering, Mie scattering, and connection losses. Although material absorption for pure silica is only around 0.03 dB/km (modern fiber has attenuation around 0.3 dB/km), impurities in the original optical fibers caused attenuation of about 1000 dB/km. Other forms of attenuation are caused by physical stresses to the fiber, microscopic fluctuations in density, and imperfect splicing techniques.

Transmission windows

Each of the effects that contributes to attenuation and dispersion depends on the optical wavelength, however wavelength bands exist where these effects are weakest, making these bands, or windows, most favorable for transmission. These windows have been standardized, and the current bands defined are the following: ^[3]

Note that this table shows that current technology has managed to bridge the second and third windows- originally the windows were disjoint.

Historically, the first window used was from 800-900 nm; however losses are high in this region and because of that, this is mostly used for short-distance communications. The second window is around 1300 nm, and has much lower losses. The region has zero dispersion. The third window is around 1500nm, and is the most widely used. This region has the lowest attenuation losses and hence it achieves the longest range. However it has some dispersion, and dispersion compensators are used to remove this.

Regeneration

When a communications link must span a larger distance than existing fiber-optic technology is capable of, the signal must be regenerated at intermediate points in the link by repeaters. Repeaters add substantial cost to a communication system, and so system designers attempt to minimize their use.

Recent advances in fiber and optical communications technology have reduced signal degradation so far that regeneration of the optical signal is only needed over distances of hundreds of kilometers. This has greatly reduced the cost of optical networking, particularly over undersea spans where the cost and reliability of repeaters is one of the key factors determining the performance of the whole cable system. The main advances contributing to these performance improvements are dispersion management, which seeks to balance the effects of dispersion against non-linearity; and solitons, which use nonlinear effects in the fiber to enable dispersion-free propagation over long distances.

Last mile

Main article: Last mile

Although fiber-optic systems excel in high-bandwidth applications, optical fiber has been slow to achieve its goal of fiber to the premises or to solve the last mile problem. However, as bandwidth demand increases, more and more progress towards this goal can be observed. In Japan, for instance, fiber-optic systems are beginning to replace wire-based DSL as a broadband Internet source. South Korea’s KT also provides a service called FTTH (Fiber To The Home), which provides 100 percent fiber-optic connections to the subscriber’s home. Verizon, a US based telecom company, provides a service called FIOS which offers TV, high-speed internet, and telephone communications on a 100 percent fiber-optic network to a junction box mounted in a subscriber’s home.

Comparison with electrical transmission

The choice between optical fiber and electrical (or copper) transmission for a particular system is made based on a number of trade-offs. Optical fiber is generally chosen for systems requiring higher bandwidth or spanning longer distances than electrical cabling can accommodate. The main benefits of fiber are its exceptionally low loss, allowing long distances between amplifiers or repeaters; and its inherently high data-carrying capacity, such that thousands of electrical links would be required to replace a single high bandwidth fiber. Another benefit of fiber is that even when run alongside each other for long distances, fiber cables experience effectively no crosstalk, in contrast to some types of electrical transmission lines.

In short distance and relatively low bandwidth applications, electrical transmission is often preferred because of its

• Lower material cost, where large quantities are not required.
• Lower cost of transmitters and receivers.
• Ease of splicing.
• Capability to carry electrical power as well as signals.
• Ease of operating transducers in linear mode.

Because of these benefits of electrical transmission, optical communication is not common in short box-to-box, backplane, or chip-to-chip applications; however, optical systems on those scales have been demonstrated in the laboratory.

In certain situations fiber may be used even for short distance or low bandwidth applications, due to other important features:

• Immunity to electromagnetic interference, including nuclear electromagnetic pulses (although fiber can be damaged by alpha and beta radiation).
• High electrical resistance, making it safe to use near high-voltage equipment or between areas with different earth potentials.
• Lighter weight, important, for example, in aircraft.
• No sparks, important in flammable or explosive gas environments.
• Not electromagnetically radiating, and difficult to tap without disrupting the signal, important in high-security environments.
• Much smaller cable size — important where pathway is limited, such as networking an existing building, where smaller channels can be drilled.

Governing standards

In order for various manufacturers to be able to develop components that function compatibly in fiber optic communication systems, a number of standards have been developed. The International Telecommunications Union publishes several standards related to the characteristics and performance of fibers themselves, including

• ITU-T G.651, «Characteristics of a 50/125 µm multimode graded index optical fibre cable»
• ITU-T G.652, «Characteristics of a single-mode optical fibre cable»

Other standards, produced by a variety of standards organizations, specify performance criteria for fiber, transmitters, and receivers to be used together in conforming systems. Some of these standards are the following:

• 10 gigabit Ethernet
• FDDI
• Fibre Channel
• Gigabit Ethernet
• HIPPI
• Synchronous Digital Hierarchy
• Synchronous Optical Networking

TOSLINK is the most common format for digital audio cable using plastic optical fiber to connect digital sources to digital receivers.

See also

• Optical communication
• Information theory
• Verizon FiOS
• Dark fiber

References

• Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology
• Fiber-Optic Technologies by Vivek Alwayn
• Agrawal, Govind P. (2002). Fiber-optic communication systems. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-21571-6. 

Notes

1. ^ Alwayn, Vivek (2004-04-23). Splicing. Fiber-Optic Technologies. Cisco Systems. Retrieved on 2006-12-31.
2. ^ NTT (2006-09-29). "14 Tbit/s over a single optical fiber: successful demonstration of world's largest capacity". Press release. Retrieved on 2006-12-31.
3. ^ Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology