All-Optical Network Consortium-ultrafast TDM networks

We describe recent results of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) sponsored Consortium on Wideband All-Optical Networks which is developing architectures, technology components, and applications for ultrafast 100 Gb/s time-division multiplexing (TDM) optical networks. The shared-media ultrafast networks we envision are appropriate for providing low-access-delay bandwidth on demand to both future high-burst rate (100 Gb/s) users as well aggregates of lower-rate users (i.e., a heterogeneous user population). To realize these goals we are developing ultrafast network architectures such as HLAN, described here, that operate well in high-latency environments and require only limited processing capability at the ultrafast bit rates. We also describe results on 80-Gb/s, 90-km soliton transmission, 100-Gb/s soliton compression laser source technology, picosecond short-pulse fiber ring lasers, picosecond-accuracy optical bit-phase sensing and clock recovery, all-optical injection-locked fiber figure-eight laser clock recovery, short-pulse fiber loop storage, and all-optical pulse width and wavelength conversion     

Low insertion loss and low dispersion penalty InGaAsP quantum-well high-speed electroabsorption modulator for 40-Gb/s very-short-reach, long-reach, and long-haul applications

We present a metal-organic-chemical-vapor-deposition-grown low-optical-insertion-loss InGaAsP/InP multiple-quantum-well electroabsorption modulator (EAM), suitable for both nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero (RZ) applications. The EAM exhibits a dynamic (RF) extinction ratio of 11.5 dB at 1550 nm for 3 Vp-p drive under 40-Gb/s modulation. The optical insertion loss of the modulator in the on-state is -5.2 dB at 1550 nm. In addition, the EAM also exhibits a 3-dB small-signal response (S21) of greater than 38 GHz, allowing it to be used in both 40-Gb/s NRZ and 10-Gb/s RZ applications. The dispersion penalty at 40 Gb/s is measured to be 1.2 dB over /spl plusmn/40 ps/nm of chromatic dispersion. Finally, we demonstrate 40-Gb/s transmission performance over 85 km and 700 km.     

40-Gb/s RZ transmission over a transoceanic distance in a dispersion managed standard fiber using a modified inline synchronous modulation method

This paper analyzes in detail numerically a 40-Gb/s return-to-zero (RZ) transmission system over a transoceanic distance in a strongly dispersion managed line composed of standard single-mode fiber (SMF) and dispersion compensation fiber (DCF). We derived a periodically steady-state pulse (a DM soliton) in a DM line. Since the pulse width of a steady-state pulse is too broad for a 40 Gb/s system, the conventional in-line synchronous modulation technique cannot greatly improve the transmission quality. However, we found that the modified inline synchronous modulation technique, which is reported as the black-box optical regenerator, can effectively extend the transmission distance even in such a strongly DM line. We discuss the mechanism of the modified synchronous modulation technique with respect to a steady-state pulse in a transmission line, and show that a 40-Gb/s RZ signal can be transmitted over 20 000 km.     

Comparison of nonlinear pulse interactions in 160-Gb/s quasi-linear and dispersion managed soliton systems

The understanding and development of 160-Gb/s transmission systems requires the study of the impact of different dispersion compensation schemes on pulse propagation in nonlinear fiber. In this paper, we present an investigation of 160-Gb/s optical transmission systems, focusing on optimal propagation regimes, and in particular, we analyze different transmission limitations and dominant nonlinear effects by comparing quasi-linear and dispersion managed soliton systems. Two quasi-linear systems, one using nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber (NZDSF) and the other single-mode fiber (SMF), and one short-period (1 km) dispersion managed soliton (DMS) system are studied, both for single-channel and wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) transmission. First, the performance of the two quasi-linear systems in single-channel transmission are compared and it is shown that the NZDSF and SMF systems allow similar error-free transmission distances with only small differences in the intrachannel four-wave mixing (IFWM) induced amplitude jitter. The effect of pulsewidth on transmission performance in this regime was investigated and the use of shorter pulses was found to result in lower amplitude jitter. We analyzed the behavior of the DMS system and showed that the reduced pulse broadening during transmission allowed a significantly longer single-channel transmission distance with a smaller impact of nonlinearities compared to quasi-linear propagation. The sensitivity of the DMS system performance to statistical fluctuations in the fiber dispersion was studied and the results show the level of accuracy in the dispersion management map which must be ensured in these systems. Finally, the performance of the DMS in WDM transmission was investigated and it was found that it was subject to very large penalties increasing the minimum channel spacing possible because of the strong impact of interchannel cross-phase modulation (XPM).     

Experimental and theoretical characterization of a 40-Gb/s long-haul single-channel transmission system

We present a comparison between experiment and simulation of a 40-Gb/s periodically stationary dispersion-managed soliton (DMS) system in a recirculating loop. We find that we can propagate an error-free signal over 6400 km at 40 Gb/s and over 12 000 km if we lower the data rate to 10 Gb/s, keeping all other parameters constant. A careful analysis of the limiting factors shows the strong influence of nonlinear optical pulse-to-pulse interactions, causing a large increase in timing jitter. At a transmission distance of 6400 km, a large fraction of the jitter is due to pulse-to-pulse interactions. Moreover, we find that the system performance is very sensitive to parameter variations. We conclude that periodically stationary DMS systems suffer from numerous problems when increasing the data rate, suggesting that it may be impractical for wavelength-division multiplex transmission at 40 Gb/s.     

Comparison between NRZ and duobinary Modulation at 43 gb/s for MLSI-based and DCF-based transmission systems

In this paper, the performance of midlink spectral inversion (MLSI) is compared with the performance of "conventional" dispersion compensation fiber (DCF)-based transmission for two data formats: 43-Gb/s ON-OFF keying nonreturn-to-zero (OOK-NRZ) and 43-Gb/s duobinary. In the MLSI-based system, a polarization-diverse subsystem was used for spectral inversion employing magnesium-oxide-doped periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide technology. The transmission link consists of 8 /spl times/ 100 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) using erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) for amplification. Compared to the DCF-based system, it is seen that the MLSI-based configuration enhances the dispersion tolerance for both the NRZ and the duobinary modulation formats. It is concluded that the combination of the MLSI and the duobinary modulation format yields a highly dispersion-tolerant stable 43-Gb/s transmission system.     

Design and Characteristics of Guardring-Free Planar AlInAs Avalanche Photodiodes

This paper reports a guardring-free planar AlInAs avalanche photodiode (APD) for optical fiber communications. AlInAs APDs can achieve a larger gain-bandwidth product (GBP) with lower excess noise than commercial InP APDs, and the guardring-free planar structure enables these superior AlInAs APDs to have both a low dark current and high reliability for practical use. We present the structure, fabrication, designs, APD characteristics, and receiver sensitivity, systematically. The guardring-free planar structure and its peculiarities are described, and we show APD designs for 2.5-Gb/s and 10-Gb/s applications and their characteristics. A 0.2-mum -thick AlInAs multiplication layer achieves a GBP of 120 GHz and an excess noise factor of 2.9 at a multiplication factor of 10. Their dark currents are less than 20 nA and their lifetime is evaluated to be 25 million hours at 85^degC. Lastly, we demonstrate that the guardring-free planar AlInAs APDs with a transimpedance amplifier achieve the remarkable sensitivity of -37.0 dBm at a bit error rate of 10^-10 for 2.5-Gb/s signals and of -29.9 dBm at a bit error rate of 10^-12 for 10-Gb/s signals. This performance indicates that the guardring-free planar AlInAs APDs have made great advances against commercial InP APDs and other AlInAs APDs.     

Mode Coupling in Plastic Optical Fiber Enables 40-Gb/s Performance

We report 40-Gb/s capability of 50-mum core plastic optical fiber using differential modal delay measurements and power penalty due to intersymbol interference computations. The results are explained via a comprehensive multimode fiber model that includes mode coupling (MC) and differential modal attenuation (DMA). We show that strong MC can enable 40-Gb/s transmission for reach in excess of 100 m even in the presence of irregularities in the refractive index profile that prevent 10-Gb/s performance without MC. Furthermore, we show that DMA effects are negligible and that the mode power distributions are not a good indicator of bandwidth.     

100-Gb/s DQPSK Transmission Experiment Without OTDM for 100G Ethernet Transport

In order to realize a future 100-Gb Ethernet (100 GbE) transport, 100-Gb/s transmission without 100-GHz-class electronics and optical time-division-multiplexing technique was demonstrated. By using a differential quadrature phase-shift-keying (DQPSK) modulation format and commercially available electronics, 2- and 50-km transmissions of 100-Gb/s signal were successfully achieved over a standard single mode fiber. The receiver sensitivity, chromatic dispersion, and differential group delay tolerances of 100-Gb/s DQPSK signal were also evaluated. Through these evaluations, the possibility of DQPSK modulation for future 100-GbE transport is verified     

Simulation and Experimental Characterization of SOA-MZI-Based Multiwavelength Conversion

We present, for the first time, extensive simulation and experimental characterizations of single SOA-MZI-based multiwavelength conversion (MWC) of NRZ data at 10 Gb/s and RZ data at 40 Gb/s under various parametric conditions deploying ITU standard 100- and 200-GHz channel spacing. We analyze, in particular, the physical performance impairments caused by high-order four-wave mixing interference. Our simulation results indicate the promising performance of the MWC up to eight channels with 200-GHz channel spacing. We further experimentally demonstrate four-channel 10-Gb/s error-free MWC with signal regeneration possibilities and 40-Gb/s MWC with moderate penalties, based on commercially available integrated SOA-MZIs. We obtained clear, open converted eye diagrams and achieved negligible difference in channel performance among all MWC channels at both bit rates. Our results proved the excellent performance of a simple scheme for various future network and system applications, such as all-optical wavelength multicast and grid networking.      

Impact of Channel Plan and Dispersion Map on Hybrid DWDM Transmission of 42.7-Gb/s DQPSK and 10.7-Gb/s OOK on 50-GHz Grid

We investigate experimentally the performance of 42.7-Gb/s return-to-zero (RZ) differential quadrature phase-shift-keyed (DQPSK) channels in a dense wavelength-division-multiplexed transmission system having 10.7-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) on-off keyed (OOK) channels. Cross-phase modulation (XPM) from the OOK channels is found to be a dominating nonlinear penalty source for copropagating DQPSK channels in a dispersion-managed transmission link with multiple standard single-mode fiber spans. It is also found that the XPM penalty strongly depends on channel occupancy and residual dispersion per span (RDPS). Large RDPS effectively mitigates XPM even for the worst-case occupancy where a 42.7-Gb/s RZ-DQPSK channel is amidst several 10.7-Gb/s NRZ-OOK channels on a 50-GHz channel grid.     

Low-Chirp 85-Gb/s Duobinary Modulator in InP Using Electroabsorption Modulators

In 2005, Griffin showed that an InP phase-shift-keying/duobinary Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) modulator could achieve good transmission performance at 10 Gb/s, despite modest residual amplitude modulation in the phase modulators in the MZI (ratio of real to imaginary part of index change was $sim$0.1). Here we show that even strong amplitude modulation in the “phase” modulators (ratio of real to imaginary part of index change is $sim$ 1.0) gives good transmission performance. Allowing for strong amplitude modulation allows a significant increase in modulator bandwidth. We demonstrate low-chirp 85.4-Gb/s optical duobinary generation in a fully packaged InP photonic integrated circuit.      

Impact of nonlinear phase noise on direct-detection DQPSK WDM systems

The performance degradation of differential quadrature phase-shift keying (DQPSK) wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) systems due to self-phase modulation (SPM)- and cross-phase modulation (XPM)-induced nonlinear phase noise is evaluated in this letter. The XPM-induced nonlinear phase noise is approximated as Gaussian distribution and summed together with the SPM-induced nonlinear phase noise. We demonstrate that 10-Gb/s systems, whose walkoff length is larger than 40-Gb/s systems', are more sensitive to XPM-induced nonlinear phase noise than 40-Gb/s systems. Furthermore, DQPSK WDM systems show lower tolerance to both SPM- and XPM-induced nonlinear phase noise than differential phase-shift keying WDM systems.     

Dynamic optical soliton communication

Digitally coded optical solitons at 5 and 10 Gb/s have been successfully transmitted over 400 and 300 km, respectively, using erbium-doped fiber amplifiers and repeaters. The soliton pulse source is a gain-switched distributed-feedback laser diode with spectral windowing. The repeater spacing for the 10-Gb/s transmission with an input soliton of A=1.4 is 25 km, which is extended to 50 km for 5-Gb/s transmission with an input soliton of N=1.8-2.0     

Coherent Equalization and POLMUX-RZ-DQPSK for Robust 100-GE Transmission

We discuss the use of a coherent digital receiver for the compensation of linear transmission impairments and polarization demultiplexing in a transmission system compatible with a future 100-Gb/s Ethernet standard. We present experimental results on the transmission performance of 111 Gbit/s POLMUX-RZ-DQPSK. For a dense WDM setup with channels carrying 111 Gbit/s with a 50 GHz channel spacing (2.0 bits/s/Hz), we show the feasibility of 2375 km transmission. This is enabled through coherent detection which results in excellent noise performance, and subsequent electronic equalization which provides the high tolerance to polarization mode dispersion and chromatic dispersion (CD). Furthermore, we discuss the impact of sampling and digital signal processing with either 1 or 2 samples/bit. We show that when combined with low-pass electrical filtering, 1 sample/bit signal processing is sufficient to obtain a large tolerance towards CD. The proposed modulation and detection techniques enable 111 Gbit/s transmission that is directly compatible with the existing 10 Gbit/s infrastructure.     

100-Gb/s Packet Signal Generation With Spectral Efficiency Larger Than 1 bit/Hz/s

We have experimentally demonstrated how to generate 100-Gb/s packet signals with spectral efficiency higher than 1bit/Hz/s for the first time. The optical packet with 3.125-Gb/s label and 100-Gb/s return-to-zero differential quadrature phase-shift-keying payload are generated by using optical carrier-suppression and separation and vestigial sideband filtering techniques. The performance of transmission and label erasure has also been evaluated.     

High-reliability and low-dark-current 10-Gb/s planar superlatticeavalanche photodiodes

For compact and high-sensitivity 10 Gb/s optical receiver applications, we have developed low-dark-current planar-structure InAlGaAs-InAlAs superlattice avalanche photodiodes with a Ti-implanted guard-ring. The APDs exhibited dark current as low as 0.36 μA at a gain of 10. The temperature dependence of the dark current was confirmed to be in a sufficient level for practical 10-Gb/s applications. The APDs also exhibited a quantum efficiency of 67%, a gain-bandwidth-product of 110 GHz, a top 3-dB bandwidth of 15.2 GHz, and a minimum gain for 10-GHz bandwidth of 1.6. Preliminary aging test also showed a stable dark current operation after aging of over 2200 h at 200°C. These high-reliability, low-dark-current, high-speed, and wide-dynamic-range characteristics are promising for 10-Gb/s high-sensitivity optical receiver use     

Dispersion tolerance and transmission distance of a 40-Gb/sdispersion management soliton transmission system

We investigate the tolerance of the variation of average dispersion in a 40-Gb/s dispersion-managed soliton (DMS) transmission system. It is theoretically shown that dispersion tolerance is governed by pulse broadening and soliton interaction, and that the largest dispersion tolerance can be achieved by optimizing the pulse energy depending on the transmission distance. We construct a 40-Gb/s recirculating loop transmission system and show that the dispersion tolerance of over 180 ps/nm, which is much larger than that of a linear nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) format system, can be realized by the optimization of the pulse energy at a transmission distance of more than 1000 km     

Link Reliability Improvement for Optical Wireless Communication Systems With Temporal-Domain Diversity Reception

We experimentally demonstrate a simple temporal- domain diversity reception (TD-DR) scheme to enhance the reliability of optical wireless transmission links corrupted by atmospheric turbulence (AT) effects. Both nonreturn-to-zero and Manchester encoded on-off-keying modulation schemes are studied in laboratory environments at a 1.25-Gb/s data rate. AT effects are emulated as a slowly varying log-normal intensity variation for the received signal. System bit-error ratio is tracked for the performance evaluation, and results show that the outage probability due to the AT-induced intensity fluctuation for a 1.25-Gb/s link using Manchester coding is reduced from 3.2%plusmn0.1% to <0.1%, when the TD-DR is employed.     

Investigation of system upgradability over installed fiber-optic cable using 40-Gb/s WDM signals toward multiterabit optical networks

An investigation of system upgradability of installed fiber-optic cable was conducted using 40-Gb/s wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) signals toward multiterabit optical networks. A field trial of 63-channel 40-Gb/s dispersion-managed soliton WDM signal transmission was successfully demonstrated over 320-km (4 /spl times/ 80-km) installed nonzero-dispersion-shifted fibers. The average Q factor of 15.4 dB was obtained, and very stable long-term bit-error-ratio performance was confirmed without polarization-mode dispersion compensation. This system upgradability investigation in the field environment provided the confidence to introduce 40-Gb/s technologies and effectively to construct multiterabit optical networks following the demand increase in the future.