This Review summarizes the simultaneous transmission of several independent spatial channels of light along optical fibres to expand the data-carrying capacity of optical communications. Recent results achieved in both multicore and multimode optical fibres are documented.

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Space-division multiplexing in optical fibres

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technique which is now used in most new and emerging broadband wired and wireless communication systems because it is an effective solution to intersymbol interference caused by a dispersive channel. Very recently a number of researchers have shown that OFDM is also a promising technology for optical communications. This paper gives a tutorial overview of OFDM highlighting the aspects that are likely to be important in optical applications. To achieve good performance in optical systems OFDM must be adapted in various ways. The constraints imposed by single mode optical fiber, multimode optical fiber and optical wireless are discussed and the new forms of optical OFDM which have been developed are outlined. The main drawbacks of OFDM are its high peak to average power ratio and its sensitivity to phase noise and frequency offset. The impairments that these cause are described and their implications for optical systems discussed.

OFDM for Optical Communications

Optical wireless communication (OWC) refers to transmission in unguided propagation media through the use of optical carriers, i.e., visible, infrared (IR), and ultraviolet (UV) bands. In this survey, we focus on outdoor terrestrial OWC links which operate in near IR band. These are widely referred to as free space optical (FSO) communication in the literature. FSO systems are used for high rate communication between two fixed points over distances up to several kilometers. In comparison to radio-frequency (RF) counterparts, FSO links have a very high optical bandwidth available, allowing much higher data rates. They are appealing for a wide range of applications such as metropolitan area network (MAN) extension, local area network (LAN)-to-LAN connectivity, fiber back-up, backhaul for wireless cellular networks, disaster recovery, high definition TV and medical image/video transmission, wireless video surveillance/monitoring, and quantum key distribution among others. Despite the major advantages of FSO technology and variety of its application areas, its widespread use has been hampered by its rather disappointing link reliability particularly in long ranges due to atmospheric turbulence-induced fading and sensitivity to weather conditions. In the last five years or so, there has been a surge of interest in FSO research to address these major technical challenges. Several innovative physical layer concepts, originally introduced in the context of RF systems, such as multiple-input multiple-output communication, cooperative diversity, and adaptive transmission have been recently explored for the design of next generation FSO systems. In this paper, we present an up-to-date survey on FSO communication systems. The first part describes FSO channel models and transmitter/receiver structures. In the second part, we provide details on information theoretical limits of FSO channels and algorithmic-level system design research activities to approach these limits. Specific topics include advances in modulation, channel coding, spatial/cooperative diversity techniques, adaptive transmission, and hybrid RF/FSO systems.

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Survey on Free Space Optical Communication: A Communication Theory Perspective

Digital coherent receivers have caused a revolution in the design of optical transmission systems, due to the subsystems and algorithms embedded within such a receiver. After giving a high-level overview of the subsystems, the optical front end, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, which relax the tolerances on these subsystems are discussed. Attention is then turned to the compensation of transmission impairments, both static and dynamic. The discussion of dynamic-channel equalization, which forms a significant part of the paper, includes a theoretical analysis of the dual-polarization constant modulus algorithm, where the control surfaces several different equalizer algorithms are derived, including the constant modulus, decision-directed, trained, and the radially directed equalizer for both polarization division multiplexed quadriphase shift keyed (PDM-QPSK) and 16 level quadrature amplitude modulation (PDM-16-QAM). Synchronization algorithms employed to recover the timing and carrier phase information are then examined, after which the data may be recovered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges for future coherent optical transmission systems.

Digital Coherent Optical Receivers: Algorithms and Subsystems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has recently been proposed as a modulation technique for optical networks, because of its good spectral efficiency, flexibility, and tolerance to impairments. We consider the planning problem of an OFDM optical network, where we are given a traffic matrix that includes the requested transmission rates of the connections to be served. Connections are provisioned for their requested rate by elastically allocating spectrum using a variable number of OFDM subcarriers and choosing an appropriate modulation level, taking into account the transmission distance. We introduce the Routing, Modulation Level and Spectrum Allocation (RMLSA) problem, as opposed to the typical Routing and Wavelength Assignment (RWA) problem of traditional WDM networks, prove that is also NP-complete and present various algorithms to solve it. We start by presenting an optimal ILP RMLSA algorithm that minimizes the spectrum used to serve the traffic matrix, and also present a decomposition method that breaks RMLSA into its two substituent subproblems, namely 1) routing and modulation level and 2) spectrum allocation (RML+SA), and solves them sequentially. We also propose a heuristic algorithm that serves connections one-by-one and use it to solve the planning problem by sequentially serving all the connections in the traffic matrix. In the sequential algorithm, we investigate two policies for defining the order in which connections are considered. We also use a simulated annealing meta-heuristic to obtain even better orderings. We examine the performance of the proposed algorithms through simulation experiments and evaluate the spectrum utilization benefits that can be obtained by utilizing OFDM elastic bandwidth allocation, when compared to a traditional WDM network.

https://www.ceid.upatras.gr/webpages/faculty/manos/kchristodou/journals/ofdm_jlt_revision_2.pdf

Elastic Bandwidth Allocation in Flexible OFDM-Based Optical Networks

In this work we investigate the optimum design parameters of a bit-true computationally-efficient RF-Pilot-tone implementation. For a 23.9-Gb/s receiver an implementation penalty of less than 0.6dB is observed using only 27% of Virtex5 resources.

Computationally efficient hardware design of RF-pilot tone based phase noise compensation for optical OFDM

We present a phase noise canceler to improve the accuracy of transmitter I/Q skew estimation for high baud-rate optical transponders using high-order modulation formats. The proposed technique reduces the probability of failure due to estimation errors by an order of magnitude.

Accurate Estimation of Transmitter I/Q Skew for High-Rate Spectrally Efficient Optical Transponders

We analyze a novel strategy to reduce the computational complexity of the back-propagation method with negligible system performance degradation considering different fiber types.

Reduced complexity for back-propagation method algorithm

Using a global optimization algorithm, we maximize the reach of DPSK and DQPSK systems including PMD and nonlinear phase noise at data rates ranging from 5 Gbit/s to 230 Gbit/s.

Impact of PMD and nonlinear phase noise on the global optimization of DPSK and DQPSK systems

We present Stereo Multiplexing, a novel technique that permits simultaneous direct detection of two modulated optical carriers. This is accomplished by modulating the optical carriers with the difference and the sum of two signals. The linear performance of Stereo-multiplexed DQPSK signals is compared to single-carrier DQPSK and dualcarrier DQPSK. Subsequently, by means of simulations, the robustness of each format is compared for single channel and DWDM transmission of 55.5 Gb/s through 1040 km of SMF. This is done by searching the optimum dispersion map and input powers for each format and looking at the stability of the performance around the optimum. We show that the best performance and robustness is obtained by sharing the information between two carriers, and that Stereo is only 1dB below dual-carrier NRZ-DQPSK. We discuss the penalty associated with designing a DWDM system based only on the optimization of transmission of single channel.

Bernhard Spinnler

Papers

Computationally efficient hardware design of RF-pilot tone based phase noise compensation for optical OFDM

Accurate Estimation of Transmitter I/Q Skew for High-Rate Spectrally Efficient Optical Transponders

Reduced complexity for back-propagation method algorithm

Impact of PMD and nonlinear phase noise on the global optimization of DPSK and DQPSK systems

Performance of Stereo Multiplexing in Single Channel and DWDM Systems Using Direct Detection with Optimum Dispersion Maps