Introduction

• Ever since ancient times, people had a principal need to

communicate

• This need created interests in devising commn. Systems

• Optical commn. System is one such system

• Earliest known optical commn. used fire-signal (used by

Greeks in 8th century BC)

– Ex.: sending alarms, calls for help, announcement of certain

events
 Introduction
• However improvements were not pursued
actively because of technology limitations

– Speed (how fast sender can move their hands)

– Receiver is the error prone human eye
– Line of transmission paths were required
– Atmospheric effects such as fog,rain made path
unreliable

• Thus it turned out to be courier over road is

faster, more efficient and more reliable
 Introduction
• 1837(telegraph, Samuel F.B.Morse) era of electrical commn. Started
– Letters & numbers coded by series of dots and dashes
– Encoded symbols were sent as electrical pulses over cu wire at a rate of 10 pulses/sec.

• 1874(Baudot) enabled the information speeds to

increase to about 120 bits/sec. but required skilled
operator

• 1876(telephone, A.G.Bell) device could transmit entire voice signal

in analog form didn’t require any expertice to use.

• Both telegraph & telephone signals were sent using a

baseband transmission mode
 Introduction
• In the ensuing years more sophisticated, reliable and
large capacity systems were deployed.

• The motivation behind each new system were:

– To improve the transmission fidelity

– To increase the data rate or capacity of a commn. Link
– To increase the repeaterless transmission distance

• These activities led to the birth of wide variety of commn.

systems
 Introduction
• No significant advances for optical commn. appeared until

– the invention of LASER in early 1960s and

– a series of technology developments related to optical fiber around
1970

• These events led to practical lightwave transmission system

worldwide in 1978

• These systems operate in near-infrared region of EM spectrum and

uses optical fibers as transmission medium
 Evolution of fiber optic systems
• Inception 1974

• Transmission capacity (BL) ↑ 10 fold every four years

• Growth is due to advancement in several major technologies

(i) optical fiber

(ii) light sources

(iii)photo detectors

(iv)optical amplifiers
 First Generation
• First generation links operated around 850 nm

• Silica fibers (multimode),GaAs based source,Si

photodetector

• Demonstrated in 1977 at Los Angles Chicago

Similarly in Europe & Japan

• 45 – 140 Mbps 10 Km

• Limitation: Intermodal dispersion & fiber loss

 Second Generation
• Sources & detectors operated at 1310 nm (zero dispersion)

• Resulted in ↑ in repeaterless transmission distance

• Intercity applns. – used multimode fiber

later in 1984 – single mode fibers

• Bit rates: 155 & 622 Mbps (in some cases 2.5 Gbps)

• Repeater spacing of 40Km

• In LAN both MM & SM at 1310 used

10 – 100 Mbps, 500m – 10s 0f Km
 Third Generation
• Systems operating at 1550 nm (lowest attn.)

• Dispersion minimized through DSF

• Routine traffic : 2.5Gbps over 90Km

• Advances in high quality laser(1996) & detectors

led to single-wavelength tr.capacity of
10Gbps (OC-192)
 Fourth Generation

• Introduction of optical amplifiers(1989)

- Major boost to fiber txion capacity

• Same time period, txion using soliton

signals were demonstrated

• Soliton at rates of 10 Gbps – sent over

12,200 Km
 Fifth Generation

• EDFA & WDM used to boost capacity

levels of 40-160 Gbps and

• Repeaterless distance:
24000Km -35000Km

• Operating wavelength : 1530 to 1570nm

• Link operating (2005) at 40 Gbps were
installed and

• Field trials of 160 Gbps long-distance txion

systems were tested successfully.
 Advantages of optical fibers
• Long distance transmission

• Large information capacity

• Small size and low weight

• Immunity to EMI

• Enhanced safety

• Increased signal security

O- original
E- Extended
S- Short
C- Conventional
L- Long
U- Ultra-long
 Multiplexing

• To handle the continuosly rising demand

for high BW services

• Telecom. Companies worldwide are

implementing increasingly sophisticated
digital multiplexing techniques
 Examples of information rates for
some typical services
Type of service Data rate
Video on demand 1.5 to 6 Mbps
Video games 1 to 2 Mbps
Remote education 1.5 to 3 Mbps
Electronic shopping 1.5 to 6 Mbps
Data transfer or telecommuting 1 to 3 Mbps
Video conferencing 0.384 to 2 Mbps
Voice (single telephone channel) 33.6 to 56 kbps
 Digital multiplexing levels used in North America,
Europe and Japan
Digital multiplexing No. of 64-kbps Bit rate (Mbps)
level channels

North America Europe Japan

DS0 1 0.064 0.064 0.064
DS1 24 1.544 - 1.544
30 - 2.048 -
48 3.152 - 3.152
DS2 96 6.312 - 6.312
120 - 8.448 -
DS3 480 - 34.368 32.064
672 44.736 - -
1344 91.053 - -
1440 - - 97.728
DS4 1920 - 139.264 -
4032 274.176 - -
5760 - - 397.200
SONET/SDH multiplexing hierarchy

• With advent of high-capacity fiber optic transmission lines

(1980s),

• Sevice providers established a standard signal format called

SONET (in NA) and SDH (in other parts of world)

• These standards define a synchronous frame structure for

sending multiplexed digital traffic over optical fiber trunk lines

• Higher-rate SONET signals are obtained by byte-interleaving

N signal.

• Thus OC-N signal will have a line rate exactly N times that of
OC-1
Common SDH and SONET line rates and
their popular numerical name
SONET Electrical SDH level Line rate Popular rate
level level (Mbps) name

OC-1 STS-1 - 51.84 -

OC-3 STS-3 STM-1 155.52 155 Mbps

OC-12 STS-12 STM-4 622.08 622 Mbps
OC-48 STS-48 STM-16 2488.32 2.5Gbps

OC-192 STS-192 STM-64 9953.28 10Gbps

OC-768 STS-768 STM-256 39813.12 40Gbps

 WDM concepts (1970s/1990s)

• The N independent optically formatted

information streams,

• each transmitting at a slightly different

wavelength are combined by means of an
optical multiplexer and

• sent over the same fiber.