Optical Networking Beyond WDM

Dr. Peter Winzer

Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent,
New Jersey, USA

Abstract:

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) has been the workhorse of data networks since the early 1990s, enabling ubiquitous and affordable data services with unabated exponential traffic growth. Today, commercial WDM systems can carry close to 10 Tbit/s over a single fiber, and research experiments have reached the 100-Tbit/s mark. Over the past few years, though, progress in WDM capacity research has noticeably slowed down, despite the use of sophisticated modulation, coherent detection, and polarization multiplexing techniques. Recent fundamental studies have pointed at the Shannon limits of (nonlinear) optical fiber transmission, and concluded that current experimental results have reached those limits to within a factor of two. In order to further scale network capacities, “space” is the only known dimension yet unexploited. Space-division multiplexing (SDM) may use parallel strands of single-mode fiber, uncoupled or coupled cores of multi-core fiber, or individual modes of multi-mode waveguides, together with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) digital signal processing to address modal crosstalk. At the beginning of an exciting new era in optical communications, this talk will review the rapidly emerging field of SDM research, place SDM in the context of commercial WDM system needs, and address some of the key challenges that SDM research will have to address over the coming decade in order to prevent the looming “capacity crunch”.

Biography:

Peter J. Winzer received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. Supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), he investigated space-borne Doppler lidar and laser communications using high-sensitivity digital modulation and detection. At Bell Labs since 2000, he has been focusing on many aspects of high-bandwidth fiber-optic communication systems, including Raman amplification, optical modulation formats, advanced direct-detection and coherent optical receiver concepts, digital signal processing, as well as on robust network architectures for dynamic data services. He has demonstrated several high-speed and high-capacity optical transmission records. He has widely published and patented and is actively involved in technical and organizational tasks with the IEEE Photonics Society and the Optical Society of America (OSA), currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. He was promoted to Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2007, and since 2010 heads the Optical Transmission Systems and Networks Research Department at Bell Labs. He is a Fellow of the OSA and the IEEE.