In a paper presented to the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition (OFC) in Anaheim today, Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, announced the first reported optical transport of electronically multiplexed 107 Gigabit per second (Gbps) data. This result represents another significant milestone in the industry's march towards being able to offer transport speeds of 100 Gbps Ethernet data networking in metro area networks.
"We are very excited about this latest test result and innovation which, when combined with our recently announced breakthrough in the first recorded transmission of 100 Gbps, provides the foundation for the next generation of broadband networking," said Martin Zirngibl, director, Bell Labs. "We see this as a critical area of Bell Labs' research as carriers look to deploy architectures that are optimized to respond to the dramatic increase in the amount of IP/data traffic produced by their enterprise customers and consumers. We feel 100 Gigabit Ethernet is a particularly important technology as carriers look to deploy multimedia IP services, such as IPTV, which requires networks that efficiently multiplex and transmit high amounts of IP-based data in its native Ethernet format."
Today data signals such as the information carried over the Internet are transported at rates of about 10Gbps and occasionally 40Gbps over SONET connections. This Bell Labs research is aimed at developing the technologies and architectures to transmit, transport and switch 107 Gb/s Ethernet-over-optical data stream (representing 100 Gb/s of data transmission plus a standard 7 percent overhead for error correction).
107 Gbps Transport Breakthrough:
Until now there has been no reported case of a high-speed electronically multiplexed optical signal transmitted at speeds greater than 85.4 Gb/s. Furthermore, no fiber transmission of signals faster than 42.7 Gbps in a spectrally compact non-RZ format have ever been reported. In a paper presented at OFC today Bell Labs researchers were able to transmit 10 channels of 107-Gbps traffic, optically modulated using electrical multiplexing, over a distance of 400 kilometers. Key to this breakthrough was the use of an integrated optical equalizer, built as a single-chip photonic integrated circuit.
To achieve the high spectral efficiency of 0.7 bits/s/Hz and total capacity of 1 terabit per second (Tbps) the researchers used nonzero dispersion fiber and a non-return-to-zero (NRZ) format, enabling the researchers to closely space the wavelength channels thus enhancing the efficiency and total capacity.
To address the need to carefully manage signal dispersion at high bit rates, Bell Labs used a dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) that was slope matched to the transmission fiber, reducing the average residual dispersion per span to +21 ps at 1550 nm. The Bell Labs scientists used hybrid EDFA/Raman amplification with counter-propagating Raman pumps to maintain signal quality.
Source: Lucent Technologies
Related stories:
Deterministic entanglement swapping: First successful implementation of a technique for quantum computers
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists led by Rainer Blatt, Markus Hennrich and Mark Riebe of the Institute for Experimental Physics at Innsbruck University recently succeeded for the first time in realizing a deterministic transfer of entanglement in their lab. They reported this important technique for future quantum computing in the online edition of the acclaimed science journal
Nature Physics.
Viral 'magic bullet' targets cancer cells with help of new compound
Researchers at McGill University and the affiliated Lady Davis Research Institute of the Jewish General Hospital – along with colleagues at the University of Ottawa and the Ottawa Health Research Institute (OHRI)–report a significant breakthrough in the use of viruses to target and destroy cancer cells, a field known as oncolytic virotherapy. Their results were published in the September early edition of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
An Unconventional Metal
The semiconductor silicon and the ferromagnet iron are the basis for much of mankind's technology, used in everything from computers to electric motors. In this week's issue of the journal
Nature (August 21st) an international group of scientists, including academic and industrial researchers from the UK, USA and Lesotho, report that they have combined these elements with a small amount of another common metal, manganese, to create a new material which is neither a magnet nor an ordinary semiconductor.
Next-gen broadband at your service
Faster, smarter broadband networks are on the way, thanks to European research. The next step will be to usher in compelling services for European consumers. Already companies are eager to get their hands on the technologies developed by the MUSE project.
Physicists tweak quantum force, reducing barrier to tiny devices
Cymbals don't clash of their own accord – in our world, anyway. But the quantum world is bizarrely different. Two metal plates, placed almost infinitesimally close together, spontaneously attract each other.
Engineers demonstrate first room-temperature semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz radiation
Engineers and applied physicists from Harvard University have demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. The breakthrough in laser technology, based upon commercially available nanotechnology, has the potential to become a standard Terahertz source to support applications ranging from security screening to chemical sensing.
Space is 'current frontier' for engineer working on next-gen wireless technologies
Bhaskar Rao is a space explorer, though he is no astronaut. The electrical engineer from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering explores the “space frontier” that has opened up with the emergence of MIMO (multiple input multiple output) technologies for wireless communications. In MIMO systems, both transmitters and receivers contain multiple antennae, which means that space – and not just time – is in play when it comes to signal processing strategies for increasing data rates, reliability, users served, and other parameters in wireless communications networks.
Scientists discover exotic quantum state of matter
A team of scientists from Princeton University has found that one of the most intriguing phenomena in condensed-matter physics -- known as the quantum Hall effect -- can occur in nature in a way that no one has ever before seen.