NSF CCF CAREER: Enabling Technologies for Beyond 1 Tb/s per Wavelength Optical Transport

Project Description Summary

Today's photonic infrastructure, whose foundations were established several decades ago, gradually extends from global backbone to access networks and even further, down to the curb, building, home and desk. Recent studies indicate that each household in North America should be connected by at least 100 Mb/s, which cannot be accommodated by the last century's technology. The 100 Gb/s Ethernet is currently under standardization, and according to industry experts 1 Tb/s Ethernet should be standardized by the year 2012-2013. Migrating to higher transmission rates comes along with certain challenges such as degradation in the signal quality due to different linear and nonlinear channel impairments and increased installation costs. The limitations of photonics-enabled networks also result from the heterogeneity of the infrastructure and consequential bottlenecks at different boundaries and interfaces.   

     The Principal Investigator (PI) proposed a multidisciplinary research initiative to overcome the limitations of heterogeneous optical networks and enable serial 1 Tb/s optical transport. The coded modulation techniques that we propose can achieve the serial 1 Tb/s optical transport while employing both commercially available components operating at lower speeds and novel devices to be developed during this research. In our approach, modulation, coding and multiplexing are performed in a unified fashion so that, effectively, the transmission, signal processing, detection and decoding are done at much lower symbol rates. At these lower rates, dealing with the nonlinear effects and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is manageable while the aggregate data rate is maintained at 1 Tb/s and above.

     Intellectual Merits: 

(i) Development of different coded modulation schemes, employing both single-carrier and multicarrier (in particular orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, OFDM), to enable 1 Tb/s per wavelength optical transport and for simultaneous mitigation of channel impairments over various types of optical links. Different scenarios for enabling 1 Tb/s optical transport will be studied: (a) single-carrier multilevel multidimensional coded modulation, (b) multiband coded OFDM, and (c) multi-mode fiber (MMF) optical transport in combination with multi-input multi-output (MIMO) coded OFDM. The development of MMF multiplexers/demultiplexers, MMF fibers of low loss, MMF amplifiers, MMF add-drop multiplexers will be performed in collaboration with our partners from College of Optical Sciences and Department of Mathematics. We will also explore feedback and adaptive coding schemes which can improve the performance of heterogeneous optical networks in terms of capacity, reach, robustness, and bit error ratio, and the problem of uncertainty in the knowledge of the channel state information.       

(ii) Hardware FPGA/ASIC implementation of coded modulation schemes. Configurable architectures are capable of accelerating suitable applications by several orders of magnitude when compared to traditional processor based architectures. This significant speed advantage is due to the highly parallel nature of FPGA/ASIC hardware. The preliminary results on algorithms in coding techniques have shown that common computational modules and iterative processing lend themselves to high-level of parallelism and reconfigurability. 

(iii) Validation of the proposed methodology through proof-of-concept implementation studies. These studies will take place on the device as well as on the systems level. Test infrastructure including various types of high-speed optical transmission links is available through our partners from NEC Laboratories America and ERC CIAN.

     Broader impacts. This project will strongly contribute to solve technological challenges that future 1 Tb/s optical transport and next generation of heterogeneous optical networks will face. It will also play a major role in graduate/undergraduate education by integrating research with teaching. Graduate students will be directly involved in all phases of the project from which the core parts of their dissertations and theses will be derived. The project will provide a multi-disciplinary education opportunity to students by combining communication theory, coding theory, optical communications/network modeling and simulation, optical networking and physical demonstration. It will also benefit a wider audience of graduate and undergraduate students by incorporating new research studies into several courses on advanced optical communication systems, channel coding, digital communications, wireless communications, and quantum error correction taught by the PI.

            The prime educational objectives can be summarized as follows: (i) incorporating the research studies into new courses developed by the PI (Advanced Optical Communication Systems, Wireless Communications and Quantum Error Correction); (ii) completing the book Coding for Optical Channels; (iii) publishing the second edition of the book OFDM for Optical Communications;  and (iv) editing a monograph on enabling technologies for beyond 1 Tb/s optical transport.

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Last updated: May 22, 2011.

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