Fiber-wireless (FiWi) access network: Performance evaluation and scalability analysis of the physical layer

The fiber-wireless (FiWi) access network is a prestigious architecture for next generation (NG) access network. NG access networks are proposed to provide high data rate, broadband multiple services, scalable bandwidth, and flexible communication for manifold wireless end-users (WEUs). In this paper, the FiWi access network is designed based on a wavelengths division multiplexing/time division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM/TDM PON) at the optical backhaul with data rate of 2.5 Gb/s and wireless fidelity-worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiFi–WiMAX) technologies at the wireless front-end along a 50 m–5 km wireless links with data rate of 54–30 Mb/s, respectively. The performance of the optical backhaul and the wireless front-end, in the proposed FiWi access network, has been evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER), error vector magnitude (EVM), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the physical (PHY) layer. The scalability of the optical backhaul based on maximum split ratio of 1/32 for each wavelength channel and a fiber length of 24 km from the central office (CO) to the access point (AP) is analyzed with bit error rate (BER) of 10⁻⁹.     

Optimizing amplifier spacing to improve performance in RZ-rectangular pulse based 10 Gb/s single channel dispersion managed optical communication system

In this paper, we optimize the inter-amplifier spacing in combination with duty cycle of RZ data format and EDFAs power so that link length of system can be maximized. The results for EDFA amplifier placement in 10 Gbps single channel dispersion managed optical communication system have been presented. By increasing the length of standard single mode fiber of dispersion 16 ps/nm/km in proportion to the increase in length of compensating fiber of dispersion −80 ps/nm/km, the pre-, post- and symmetrical-dispersion compensation schemes of the system have been compared. Further, schemes are observed at 8, 10 and 12 dBm values of EDFA power in the link with different duty cycle values of RZ optical pulse in the range of 0.2-0.8 with step size of 0.2 in relation to amplifier spacing to get lower value of bit error rate and timing jitter. The graphical results obtained show strong relationship among duty cycle of RZ optical pulse, EDFA power and, dispersion compensation scheme.     

Analysis of physical layer performance of hybrid optical-wireless access network

The hybrid optical-wireless access network (HOWAN) is a favorable architecture for next generation access network. It is an optimal combination of an optical backhaul and a wireless front-end for an efficient access network. In this paper, the HOWAN architecture is designed based on a wavelengths division multiplexing/time division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM/TDM PON) at the optical backhaul and a wireless fidelity (WiFi) technology at the wireless front-end. The HOWAN is proposed that can provide blanket coverage of broadband and flexible connection for end-users. Most of the existing works, based on performance evaluation are concerned on network layer aspects. This paper reports physical layer performance in terms of the bit error rate (BER), eye diagram, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the communication system. It accommodates 8 wavelength channels with 32 optical network unit/wireless access points (ONU/APs). It is demonstrated that downstream and upstream of 2 Gb/s can be achieved by optical backhaul for each wavelength channel along optical fiber length of 20 km and a data rate of 54 Mb/s per ONU/AP along a 50 m outdoor wireless link.     

On duty cycle selection of RZ optical pulse to optimize the performance of dispersion compensated 10 Gbps single channel optical communication system using dispersion compensating fibers

We present results for duty cycle selection of optical RZ pulse to optimize the performance in 10 Gbps single channel dispersion compensated optical communication system. The system has link length of 240 km with two spans. Each of the spans consists of 120 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) of 16 ps/nm/km, whose chromatic dispersion is compensated using pre-, post- and symmetrical-dispersion compensation schemes by 24 km dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) of −80 ps/nm/km. The performance of the three compensation schemes is compared by taking 8, 10, 12 and 14 dBm Er-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) power levels in the link with a duty cycle range (0.1-0.9) of RZ optical pulse. The graphical results obtained show a relationship among the duty cycle, EDFA power and dispersion compensation scheme which predicts the best performing duty cycle case. To optimize performance of the system, we recommend in general, duty cycle less than 0.3 and EDFA power below 8 dB irrespective of compensation scheme. However, with post compensation duty cycle less than 0.7 and EDFA power below 12 dBm give optimum performance. The results conclude that for the high value of duty cycle, post dispersion compensation scheme should be used.     

Low cost solution to high capacity 32 × 32 channel FTTH duplex link employing triple play services

In this paper, low cost solution based on RSOAs is proposed for a high capacity 32 × 32 channel, 20 km, FTTH duplex link employing triple play services. Here, downstream transmitters generate a 2.5-Gbps NRZ signal which is routed to both receivers and RSOA-based upstream transmitters. The RSOA modulates this signal with a 1.25-Gbps NRZ signal that effectively overwrites the downstream signal and then it is transmitted back over the same 20 km of bidirectional fiber, where it is routed to receivers at the CO. The proposed model completely eliminates the requirement of separate lasers for upstream communication which makes the system very cost effective. The high-pass filtering effect of the RSOA becomes predominant at higher input powers which has been used as an advantage here to effectively suppress the downstream signal. The impact of RSOA input power and extinction ratio of the downstream signal have been investigated and reported.     

Add/drop applications in fiber ring networks based on a reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer in a re-circulating loop

A periodic add/drop system in a fiber ring network was investigated using a reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) in a re-circulating fiber loop. After seven cascaded add/drop nodes at every 150 km along the transmission, at bit error ratio (BER) equals to 10⁻⁹ and data rate of 10 Gbps, we observed a 2.5 dB power penalty for the passing through channels with 1050 km transmission distance, and 0.3 dB sensitivity penalty variation for the periodic add/drop channels at every 150 km, respectively.     

RWA scheme minimizing FWM effect in a wide area optical network

In WDM based fiber optic communication systems, nonlinearities deteriorate network performance. A channel wavelength assignment scheme is required which not only minimize the FWM effect but also the network delay produced during assignment process. Wavelength assignment schemes along with impairment constraint based routing (ICBR) is proposed which minimizes the effect of four wave mixing and network delay in WAN. Results have been obtained for 8 and 16 equally spaced channels and observed that for equally spaced channels, in comparison with adjacent-next channel assignment scheme the proposed channel assignment scheme gives improvement in the results in terms of lower power of FWM products and lower number of in-band FWM products. Unlike existing channel assignment schemes the algorithm is simple and there is no need to calculate the FWM effect for each channel before assigning it hence reduction in network delay. Calculations have been obtained for point to point multi-fiber link of 1000 km, when power launched per channel is 1 mW for amplified wavelength convertible WAN with amplifier placement of 50 km apart.     

Research on OCDMA-based PON monitoring technologies

An optical fiber fault location method based on OCDMA coding is proposed, which may locate branch optical fiber fault at local side. The method expands dynamic range through coding gain without influencing event distinction degree. Through simulation, it indicates that dynamic range of the method may support optical fiber fault detection in PON with branching ratio of 1:16 and transmission distance of 20 km, while the distinction degree is about 10 cm.     

Investigation of wavelength division multiplexing ring network topology to enhance the system capacity

In this paper, we have investigated the wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) system using ring network topology. This network is used to increase the capacity with eight optical add/drop multiplexers (OADMs) by using dispersion compensating fiber and semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) to achieve a distance up to 1600 km. It is observed that network shows the acceptable results at 15 Gbps data rate with 100 GHz channel spacing. The OADM nodes are also varied to investigate the network performance in the term of BER and Q-factor.     

Simulation of DWDM signals using optimum span scheme with cascaded optimized semiconductor optical amplifiers

We numerically simulated the ten channels at 10 Gb/s dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) transmission faithfully over 17,227 km using 70 km span of single mode fiber (SMF) and dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) using optimum span scheme at channel spacing 20 GHz. For this purpose, inline optimized semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and DPSK format are used. We optimized the SOA parameters for inline amplifier with minimum crosstalk and amplified spontaneous emission noise with sufficient gain at bias current 400 mA. For this bias current, constant gain 36.5 dB is obtained up to saturation power 21.35 mW. We have also optimized the optical phase modulator bandwidth for 400 mA current which is around 5.5 GHz with crosstalk −14.2 dB between two channels at spacing 20 GHz.We show the 10×10 Gb/s transmission over 70 km distance with inline amplifier has good signal power received as compared to without amplifier, even at equal quality factor. We further investigated the optimum span scheme for 5670 km transmission distance for 10×10 Gb/s with channel spacing 20 at 5.5 GHz optical phase modulator bandwidth. As we increase the transmission distance up to 17,227 km, there is increase in power penalty with reasonable quality.The impact of optical power received and Q factor at 5670 and 17,227 km transmission distance for different span schemes for all channels has been illustrated. For launched optical power less than saturation, all channels are obtained at bit error rate floor of 10⁻¹⁰.     

Robustness of NRZ, RZ, CSRZ and CRZ modulation on fiber nonlinearities and amplifier noise at 40 Gbps for (OC-786) long haul link

In this paper, the robustness of NRZ, RZ, carrier-suppressed RZ (CSRZ) and chirped RZ (CRZ) modulation formats at 40 Gbps for (OC-786) long haul link on the amplifier noise figure and fiber nonlinearities has been investigated. The investigations reveals that highest Q²(dB) of the order of [20, 25]; [19, 20]; [18, 19] and [16, 18] has been obtained in case of RZ, CSRZ, CRZ and NRZ modulation formats, respectively, in the presence of fiber nonlinearities and with and without amplifier noise figure of 6 dB. It has been observed that Q²(dB) in case of CRZ fluctuate between 18 and 14 at power variation of −10 to 4 dBm and NF of 6 dB, while it is between 19-9, 20-0 and 16-0 in case of CSRZ, RZ and NRZ. It has been identified that CRZ and CSRZ have shown the robustness on fiber nonlinearity and noise at 40 Gbps up to the transmission distance of 450 km. The wide eye opening in case of CRZ modulation also proved the robustness on fiber nonlinearity and noise.     

Gain ripple minimization in fiber Raman amplifiers based on variational method

In this paper, the variational method is employed for minimizing the gain ripple of multi-wavelength fiber Raman amplifiers. The variance of gain spectrum of the fiber Raman amplifier is regarded as the cost function, restriction on total pump power and average gain is given as the constraints of the minimization problem. It is shown that the minimization problem with any necessary constraints on the pump powers, average gain and signal to noise ratio, is reduced to a two-point boundary value problem. The method gives the entire possible local and global solutions. The method is applied to different examples of fiber Raman amplifiers with different lengths from 25 km to 100 km and different numbers of pumps from 4 to 20 to determine the pump powers and wavelengths for minimum gain ripple. It was obtained for a 100 km fiber Raman amplifier the gain ripple can be about 0.1 dB with on-off gain more than 20 dB.     

Transmission performance of 20 × 10 Gb/s WDM signals using cascaded optimized SOAs with OOK and DPSK modulation formats

We investigated 20 channels at 10 Gb/s wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission over 1190 km single mode fiber and dispersion compensating fiber using cascaded inline semiconductor optical amplifier at a span of 70 km for RZ-DPSK (return zero differential phase-shift keying) modulation format by using same channel spacing, i.e. 100 GHz. We show for RZ-OOK (return zero on-off keying) format a transmission distance of up to 1050 km with Q factor more than 15 dB, without any power drops. We developed the SOA model for inline amplifier having minimum cross-talks and ASE (amplified spontaneous emission) noise power with sufficient gain. At optimal bias current of 400 mA, a high constant gain of 36.5 dB is obtained up to a saturation power of 21.36 mW. So reduction of cross-talk and distortion is possible by decreasing the bias current at appropriate amplification factor.The DPSK modulation format has less cross-talk as compared to OOK format for nonlinearities and saturation case. The impact of optical power received and Q factor at different distance for both RZ-OOK and RZ-DPSK modulation format has been illustrated. We have shown the optical spectrum and clear Eye diagram at the transmission distance of 1190 km in RZ-DPSK system and 1050 km in RZ-OOK systems.The bit error rate (BER) for all channels observed is less than 10⁻¹⁰ up to gain saturation for both DPSK and OOK systems. Finally, we investigated that the transmission distance decreases with a decrease in channel spacing of up to 20 GHz.     

Impact of extinction ratio of single arm sin LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulator on the performance of 10 and 20 Gb/s NRZ optical communication system

We investigate the impact of extinction ratio of single arm sin² LiNbO₃ Mach-Zehnder (MZ) amplitude modulator on the performance of 10 and 20 Gb/s single-channel optical communication system. For different fiber lengths, the system performance has been analyzed with the increase in the extinction ratio. The effect of variation in dispersion parameter has also been illustrated. The impact of extinction ratio (ζ), dispersion parameter and length of the fiber has been further optimized with minimum bit error rate (BER) at optimal decision threshold (10⁻⁹) for 10 and 20 Gb/s bit rate. It is found that the system gives optimum performance at extinction ratio (ζ) value 20 dB. The increase in the transmission distance from 468 km for 10 Gb/s to 532 km for 20 Gb/s has been reported, and 8 dB improvement in the Q value has been observed as the value of ζ is increased from 10 to 20 dB. At 20 Gb/s, the system gives optimum performance for dispersion parameter value only up to 4 ps/nm km; however, at 10 Gb/s the system can operate for dispersion values up to 14.3 ps/nm km. Further we investigate the self-phase modulation (SPM) effect for the increase in the input power. It is observed that the SPM effect is negligible below 3 dB m input power and it increases at higher power levels.     

Design and performance analysis in multiuser optical CDMA systems

The article presents comparative performance analysis of the proposed Optical CDMA system for 32 and 16 users with two dimensional codes. Numerical simulations have been done under interference significant environment, considering noise and dark current at data rates 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 Gbps over single mode fiber for transmission distance of more than 270 km. Results illustrate overall good performance, degraded with augment in bit rate and transmission distance, impervious with raise in number of simultaneous active users. Depicts significant performance improvement with inclusion of forward error correction RS (255,239), for low attenuation and chirp factor. It perceived, this is one of the efficient functional techniques for next generation broadband optical networks together with higher security owing to encoding and decoding, as it allow multiple users in the network to access the same fiber channel asynchronously.     

Multi-array iterative receiver for underwater acoustic OFDM communications with EXIT chart evaluation

In this paper, a multi-array iterative receiver based on log-likelihood ratio (LLR)-combining detection involving joint sparse channel estimation and decoding is proposed for underwater acoustic OFDM communication. First, Extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis is applied to evaluate the convergence behavior of the iterative receiver using the real data collected from the Kauai Acomms MURI 2011 (KAM11) experiment. This experiment was conducted in about 106 m-depth shallow water west of Kauai, HI, in June 2011, with a 20 kHz bandwidth (12–32 kHz) at range up to 3 km. It helps to explain the impact of different data configurations, detectors, and the diversity combinations in a highly inhomogeneous underwater environment and to predict the bit-error rate (BER) performance of the proposed receiver. Then the BERs as a function of the number of combined elements are illustrated to verify the prediction and analysis via the EXIT chart. Data transmission using 16QAM modulation achieves a BER of 10⁻⁴ at a data rate of 21 kb/s. The results provide guidance for the design of system parameters including the data configurations, the number of iterations for both iterative processing and low density parity check (LDPC) decoding, which are beneficial to achieve a good efficiency-performance tradeoff.     

Numerical investigation and optimization of a photonic crystal fiber for simultaneous dispersion compensation over S + C + L wavelength bands

In this paper, we numerically investigate and optimize the profile of a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) that can eliminate the residual dispersion from the telecom link as well as can provide identical dispersion compensation over S + C + L bands. A full-vectorial finite element method combined with genetic algorithm is used to optimize the fiber’s profile as well as to accurately determine its modal properties. The optimized PCF exhibits a dispersion of −98.3 ps/nm/km with a variance of ±0.55 ps/nm/km from 1.48 μm to 1.63 μm (i.e., over 150 nm bandwidth) and a zero dispersion slope. Macro-bending loss performance of the designed PCF is also studied and it is found that the fiber shows low bending losses for the smallest feasible bending radius of 5 mm. Further, sensitivity analysis has been carried out for the proposed fiber design and it has been found that a ±2% change in the fiber parameters may lead to a ±8% shift of the dispersion from its nominal value.     

On the carrier generation and HD signal transmission using the millimeter-wave radio over fiber system

The dual sideband optical carrier suppression (DSB-OCS) technique is employed in the optical carrier generation for 40 GHz radio over fiber (ROF) system. A dual electrode Mach-Zehnder modulator (DE-MZM) with the minimum transmission bias (MiTB) technique is employed to build the system. The results show that, a 40 GHz carrier is successfully generated with the amplitude up to −29 dBm and signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 35 dB and a high definition (HD) signal is successfully transmitted using the system. Finally, the bit error rate (BER) measurement is carried out for the system with 1.25 Gbps OOK signal showing an error free 40 GHz ROF system with almost no penalty between the back to back and 20 km fiber for a BER of 10⁻⁹.     

Optimal design of 32 channels spectrum slicing WDM for optical fiber access network system

In this article, the spectrum sliced dense wavelength division multiplexed passive optical network (SS-DWDM–PON) has been investigated as a power efficient and cost effective solution for optical access networks. In this work an AWG demultiplexer is used to operate as slicing system. The high speed SS-DWDM system has been realized and investigated for 32 channels with data rate up to 3 Gb/s using broadband ASE source (LED). The 3 Gb/s signals both non-return-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero (RZ) were demonstrated in 40 km optical fiber link with BER < 10⁻¹². The results obtained here demonstrate that SS-DWDM is well suited for Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network.     

Electrical nonlinearity pre-compensation for CO-OFDM system

An electrical nonlinearity pre-compensation (ENPC) combined nonlinearity with chromatic dispersion method is introduced for coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) system. Comparing with existed only nonlinearity pre-compensation (NL Pre-comp) method, ENPC method is not only suitable for low-dispersion fiber system, but also effective for high dispersion fiber transmission system without optical dispersion compensation. For 40 Gbit/s 20 × 80 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) system, ENPC method can improve the nonlinear threshold (NLT) (for Q > 10 dB) about 2.7, 1.2, and 1.0 dB, and the maximum Q factor about 1.2, 0.4, and 0.3 dB for 2, 8, and 16 ps/nm/km fiber systems, respectively. The method allow the CO-OFDM system can avoid using optical dispersion compensation even for high dispersion fiber system with higher input power, and the 2-step ENPC solution does not increase more computation complexity compared with NL pre-comp method.