Ultra-dense (UD) wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) with less than 25 GHz channel-spacing is a convenient method to upgrade conventional WDM optical fiber networks with minor additional investments. To implement UD-WDM systems, UD-WDM channels mus...
Ultra-dense (UD) wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) with less than 25 GHz channel-spacing is a convenient method to upgrade conventional WDM optical fiber networks with minor additional investments. To implement UD-WDM systems, UD-WDM channels must be aligned and then stabilized very accurately. However, the use of an accurate wavelength locker for each UD-WDM channel will increase the cost greatly. Thus, in this thesis, we propose a beat-frequency locking (BFL) method to align UD-WDM channels within UD-WDM networks without the use of wavelength lockers and study the transmission properties of UD-WDM channels based on this method.
We align nine UD-WDM channels in 12.5 GHz channel spacing within ±200 MHz errors using the beat-frequency signals between the channels generated after an optical detection. Then, 12.5 GHz-spaced 128 UD-WDM channels are aligned within ±100 MHz using the improved BFL method adopting a tunable laser source. Also, we align 25 GHz-spaced 64 UD-WDM channels located in a remote node within ±100 MHz using the improved BFL method. These channels are transmitted over a standard single-mode fiber (SMF) of 160 km to a central node (CN). When the BFL method is applied between different nodes, we may synchronize the channel frequencies of whole UD-WDM network nodes quite easily.
We measure the spectral efficiencies (SEs) of the channel-interleaved (CI) bidirectional and the unidirectional UD-WDM transmissions changing the channel spacing very accurately in 500 MHz step using the BFL method. When the Reed-Solomon code (RSC) based forward-error correction (FEC) with 7% of redundancy is used, the SEs can be as high as 0.91 and 0.87 bit/s/Hz, about 1.3 and 1.4 times larger than the 10 Gbit/s case, respectively, for the 160 km CI-bidirectional and the 320 km unidirectional transmissions, respectively.
The foregoing 128 UD-WDM channels are also used for the transmissions over an SMF of 160 km for both CI-bidirectional and unidirectional applications. In the 12.5 GHz-based CI-bidirectional UD-WDM transmission, we align two groups of the 25 GHz-spaced 64 UD-WDM channels within ±100 MHz using the BFL method and perform a 1.28 Tbit/s (2 x 64 x 10 Gbit/s) CI-bidirectional transmission. The bit-error rates (BERs) for all channels are less than 10-12, and the power penalties are about 1 dB at BER = 10-10. In the unidirectional UD-WDM transmission, we align 12.5 GHz-spaced 128 UD-WDM channels within ±100 MHz using the BFL method and perform a 1.28 Tbit/s (128 x 10.7 Gbit/s) transmission over an SMF of 160 km. The measured Q-factor values are larger than the RSC based FEC threshold at 11.4 dB.
We perform a unidirectional UD-WDM long-haul transmission. We align 12.5 GHz-spaced 100 UD-WDM channels within ±100 MHz using the BFL method and perform a 1 Tbit/s (100 x 12.4 Gbit/s) transmission with the SE of 0.8 bit/s/Hz over an SMF of 1200 km. All the UD-WDM channels are successfully transmitted and received using the block-turbo code (BTC) based FEC which is robust to non-Gaussian noises such as channel cross-talks.
We demonstrate the alignment of 50 GHz-spaced 20 dense-WDM channels, 1680 km away from CN, within ±100 MHz performing a 200 Gbit/s (20 x 12.4 Gbit/s) transmission over an SMF of 1680 km using the BTC based FEC. In all experiments, we use conventional-band erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, SMFs and the non-return-to-zero modulation format to illustrate the upgradability of conventional WDM networks.
Finally, we propose some possible UD-WDM network nodes using either arrayed-waveguide gratings or fiber-Bragg gratings.