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

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Today's photonic infrastructure, whose foundations were established several decades ago, gradually extends from global backbone to access networks and beyond. 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. This multidisciplinary research grant studies different approaches to overcome the limitations of heterogeneous optical networks and enable serial 1 Tb/s optical transport, while employing the components operating at lower speeds. In this 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 nonlinear and linear effects is manageable while the aggregate data rate is maintained at 1 Tb/s and above. The primary research objectives of this grant can be summarized as follows: (i) development of different coded modulation schemes, employing both single-carrier and multicarrier, to enable 1 Tb/s per wavelength optical transport and for simultaneous mitigation of channel impairments over various types of optical links; (ii) hardware FPGA/ASIC implementation of coded modulation schemes; and (iii) validation of the proposed methodology through proof-of-concept implementation studies.