LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Challenges in Estimating the Information Capacity of the Fiber-Optic Channel

Photo from wikipedia

Since its early commercial deployment in the late 1980s, optical fiber has evolved to become the predominant carrier of the globe’s communications. Yet, after accommodating the world’s exponentially growing appetite… Click to show full abstract

Since its early commercial deployment in the late 1980s, optical fiber has evolved to become the predominant carrier of the globe’s communications. Yet, after accommodating the world’s exponentially growing appetite for transmitted data for more than three decades, its ability to continue doing so is being challenged by fundamental factors. In this article, we review these factors and examine their consequences in terms of information capacity. In particular, we review the difficulties that are imposed by the nonlinear nature of fiber-optic transmission on the assessment of the capacity and on the definition of fundamental concepts, such as bandwidth and spectral efficiency. We discuss relevant approximations and regimes of operation in which bounds for the capacity can be effectively assessed while covering a broad range of applications ranging from interdatacenter communications to links spanning transoceanic distances. We relate to a broad variety of transmission schemes and discuss the potential benefits of spatial multiplexing with multimode and multicore fibers. State-of-the-art transmission experiments are also reviewed and compared with theoretical capacity bounds.

Keywords: capacity; fiber optic; challenges estimating; information capacity

Journal Title: Proceedings of the IEEE
Year Published: 2022

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.