A turn of phrase often heard in telecom circles is "when the market comes back." None of us knows exactly what that market will look like if and when it appears. But the market segment that has suffered most—long-haul—is the one that may benefit the most from the current slowdown.
While executives and product managers have been struggling for sales, the researchers who first helped fuel the surge in transmission capacity and distance are still at work improving long-haul technology. For this market to come back, we'll need to see considerably more traffic, of course. We'll also need to see real reductions in operating expenses, especially for 10-Gbit/s systems. And that's the focus of the research effort.
Linn Mollenauer, a researcher at Lucent Technologies Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ, notes that for many scientists, the slowdown has meant a chance to let the science catch up with the performance demands from the carriers. "There really was a point, before the bubble burst, that service providers were beginning to buy the idea of low-cost, efficient service with all-optical technology," he says. "But the technology never really got off the ground before the disaster."
Before and after the disaster, his Lightwave Systems Research group has been working on ways to make the all-optical network appealing to carriers. The group has recently presented results reflecting some advances in ultra-long-haul technology that have gotten Mollenauer excited.1
The journal article describes a novel dispersion-managed soliton technique for 10 Gbit/s, showing how transmission distances can be extended to beyond 20,000 km without optical-electrical-optical regeneration. This distance is a considerable advance in scale and, when combined with all-optical switching, would allow carriers to span North America with robust, self-correcting networks that lower operating expenses.
Solitons have been known since they were first observed in the form of solitary waves that traveled along 19th-century canals. Mollenauer generated the first fiberoptic solitons experimentally in 1980, but interest was limited until optical amplification overcame the distance limitations imposed by electro-optical conversion. In 1988, Mollenauer's group extended transmission distance to 4000 km using Raman amplification in a recirculating loop. And although WDM technology was the winner in terms of increasing transmission capacity, WDM used in conjunction with solitons has remained part of product planning strategy at several companies.
A classical optical soliton signal can travel great distances over fiber because the pulse spreading caused by chromatic dispersion is offset by the effects of self-phase modulation. More recently, dispersion-managed solitons have been developed to overcome the signal impairments found in classical solitons by splicing together two fibers having different dispersion properties to keep the total dispersion of the two close to zero.
Mollenauer's group has now taken a step beyond this technique by installing a periodic-group-delay dispersion-compensating module. The module is based on etalon technology from Avanex, and compensates for only a small part of the transmission span. Other dispersion-compensating fiber is still used, but the result is to dramatically reduce the distance-limiting effect of jitter—the one significant nonlinear penalty not corrected by previous techniques. Jitter in signal pulses results from the collision between solitons in different wavelength channels.
This modification may seem like only a minor tweaking of system performance, but, as Mollenauer explains, it means that dispersion compensation is independent of distance, is economical, and is compatible with dense WDM systems operating at 10 Gbit/s. In other words, it's ideal for continent-spanning all-optical networks.
More exotic distance-enhancing techniques such as differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) modulation may be the better dispersion-compensating approach for 40-Gbit/s systems, says Mollenauer. However, with his new periodic-group-delay dispersion-management technique, standard on-off keying works just fine. The result is another enhancement to existing long-haul technology that should serve the industry well "when the market comes back."
REFERENCE
- X. Wei, X. Liu, C. Xie, L. F. Mollenauer, Optics Lett. 28 (June 2003).

Conard Holton
Conard Holton has 25 years of science and technology editing and writing experience. He was formerly a staff member and consultant for government agencies such as the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and engineering companies such as Bechtel. He joined Laser Focus World in 1997 as senior editor, becoming editor in chief of WDM Solutions, which he founded in 1999. In 2003 he joined Vision Systems Design as editor in chief, while continuing as contributing editor at Laser Focus World. Conard became editor in chief of Laser Focus World in August 2011, a role in which he served through August 2018. He then served as Editor at Large for Laser Focus World and Co-Chair of the Lasers & Photonics Marketplace Seminar from August 2018 through January 2022. He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, with additional studies at the Colorado School of Mines and Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.