Optical Fibre Communication System (OFCS)

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Optical Fibre Communication System (OFCS) is a type of communication system that uses

Optical fibre was created for long-distance transmissions. Fibre optic connection was first proposed in the 1980s, long before the internet and broadband connectivity became commonplace in our society. Fibre access networks have matured after decades of development and are now used by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. China alone had more than 350 million fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) consumers in 2018. New types of fibre access networks are essential in providing backhaul and fronthaul connectivity to fourth generation (4G) and impending fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, in addition to directly connecting end users with optical fibres in FTTH networks.

Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are on the horizon.

Fibre access networks, also known as end nodes, are deployed at the edge of telecommunication networks. The deployment of fibre access networks faces two primary problems. For starters, access networks are extremely cost-sensitive, therefore the equipment must be inexpensive to be feasible as a mass-deployed technology. Economies of scale and low-cost optoelectronics packaging techniques are two approaches to do this. The cost of labour, as well as the speed and convenience of deployment, are the second key challenges in constructing fibre access networks. Significant civil engineering costs are incurred, particularly in industrialised nations where (1) labour costs are high and (2) infrastructure digging and trenching are difficult. As a result, established incumbent carriers in industrialised countries prefer to keep their legacy copper infrastructure and postpone the deployment of fibre in the final mile as much as feasible. There will be less design constraints, fewer legacy responsibilities, and more freedom in technology and architecture choices in developing economies or greenfield scenarios. However, those economies are sensitive to capital costs and would prefer to take advantage of the low cost of existing, mature, and standard-based technology. The design principles of fibre access technologies are being guided by these problems.

The initial impetus for FTTH fibre access technologies was broadband access.

This was largely fuelled by the rapid growth of internet apps, particularly video streaming services, which allow for viewing at any time and from any location.

Optical fibre is a cost-effective communication medium. It has reached a number of milestones since its discovery. OFT-VII, the seventh iteration of optical fibre, is the most recent version. Optical fibre has a 40-year history, during which it has seen many advancements. Optical networks today carry multi-coloured laser signals that carry hundreds of terabits per second to destinations all over the world.

As the demand for greater bandwidth has grown, light signal usage has improved to the point that it is now only a fraction of a decibel away from reaching basic constraints in terms of spectral efficiency. Although there is still some capacity gain to be gained from combating nonlinearities in optical transmission, it is becoming increasingly clear that the global communications infrastructure’s energy footprint is of such alarming proportions that addressing it must become one of the next big frontiers. With 20 percent _30 percent traffic growth rates, it’s critical to reduce the necessary energy per bit while increasing the available capacity.

This is already being addressed in several ways, including the development of more energy-efficient lasers and switching elements, the use of single wideband laser sources (frequency combs) that can flexibly serve multiple channels and formats while supporting extremely high data rates, increasing the rates of spectrally efficient single channels, spatially combining multiple channels in multicore or multimode fibres, and addressing the entire network across layers to arrive at optimum performance. It’s also becoming increasingly vital to make the most of the network resources already in place.

With the Internet, cloud computing, and storage, there will be a lot of pressure to support a lot of different types of traffic, such as medical diagnostics, indoor climate control, and autonomous cars, all of which will have different latency, bandwidth, reliability, security, cost, and energy consumption requirements. As a result, there is a rising need to use energy efficiently, as well as network resources efficiently, in a way that assures a high level of network flexibility, allowing diverse flexible bandwidth channels, and supporting variations in demand and quality of service for various applications.

The fact that optical networks are inevitably approaching fundamental capacity scalability limits in the face of continued exponential traffic growth, due to nonlinear Shannon limits of silica optical transmission fibre, has been widely discussed for more than a decade and is now commonly referred to as the “optical networks capacity crunch.” The discrepancy between two fundamental long-term technology scaling trends, Moore’s Law scaling and high-speed interface scaling, lies at the basis of this capacity crisis.

Moore’s Law is a scaling principle.

Complementary Metal Oxide- Semiconductor (CMOS) processing capabilities, and hence Moore’s Law scaling, are often tightly tied to technologies that are used to generate, process, and store digital information, and to some extent also to locally access digital information. Microprocessors, supercomputers, and data centres, as well as various types of storage and memory, Internet Protocol (IP) routers and Ethernet switches, and wireless and wireline access technologies, are examples of multi-decade-long steady scaling patterns between 40% and 90% each year.

Moore’s Law scaling is projected to continue for at least another decade, i.e., the functional scaling of technical capabilities rather than any specific technology implementation is expected to continue. These expectations are articulated as “More Moore,” “More than Moore,” and “Beyond CMOS” in various long-term industry roadmaps.

Scaling of high-speed interfaces

In stark contrast to the continued B40 percent per year scaling of CMOS-based packet processing technologies at Moore’s Law’s pace, the ability to transport traffic has only been scaling at 20 percent per year for decades, resulting in an increasingly concerning 40 percent /20 percent growth rate disparity that is beginning to affect communications across length scales and applications, from chip-to-chip interconnects to ultralong-haul submarine fibre-optics links.