Investigation of Optical Fiber Transmission System

A. Hiedzuanuddin, M. Hadri, M. Amar, K. S. Yong, Y. W. Yee

Abstract - this paper presenting the review of optical transmission system. The main focus of this paper is to investigate the fundamental concept of the optical transmission system and the improvement done by the researcher.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Since its invention in the early 1970s, the use of and demand for optical fiber have grown tremendously. The uses of optical fiber today are quite numerous. With the explosion of information traffic due to the Internet, electronic commerce, computer networks, multimedia, voice, data, and video, the need for a transmission medium with the bandwidth capabilities for handling such huge amounts of information is paramount. Fiber optics, with its comparatively infinite bandwidth, has proven to be the solution. The transmitter in the fiber optic system consist of a driver circuit along with a light source either a semiconductor laser or an LED. II. OPTICAL TRANSMISSION SYSTEM ANALYSIS

signal to the transmitter circuitry for driving the optical source can be either an analog or digital form. The functions of the associated transmitter electronic are to set and stabilize the source operating point and output power level. For high rate systems (usually greater than about 2.4Gbit per second), direct modulation of the source can lead to unacceptable optical signal distortion. In this case an external modulator is used to vary the amplitude of a continuous light output from a laser diode source in the 770-910 nm regions the light sources are generally alloys of GaAlAs. At larger wavelengths (1260 to 1675 nm) an InGaAsP alloy is the principle optical source material [4]. At the optical transmitter, the average optical power launched into the fiber from the transmitter depends upon the type of source used and the required system bit rate [1].

A. Transmission Network The transmitter consists of a light source that is dimensionally compatible with the fiber core and associated electronic control and modulation circuitry. Semiconductor light emitting diode (LEDs) and laser diode are suitable for this purpose for these devices the light output can be modulated rapidly by simply varying the input current at desired transmission rate, thereby producing an optical signal. The electric input

Figure 1: optical transmission network There are two types of transmissions signaling technique which are digital transmission and analog transmission. The operation of the LED for binary digital transmission requires the switching on an off of a current in the range of several tens to several hundreds of miliamperes. This must be performed at high speed in response to logic voltage levels at the driving circuit input. For analog transmission the drive circuit must cause

the light output from an LED source to follow accurately a time varying input voltage waveform in both amplitude and phase [1]. The modulation can be achieved in two ways: (1) by directly modulating a light source also known as intensity modulation or (2) by external modulation [2]. The transmission capacity depends on the modulation technique used. In the electronic world we are used to getting a digital bandwidth of up to 8 bits per Hz of analog bandwidth. [3]. B. Optical Transmission Source Light source plays an important role in a fiber optic communication system. The basic optical fiber system consists of a receiver, an optical fiber, and a transmitter. The light source at the transmitter is modulated by a certain drive circuit and the signal is then transmitted. The selection of the optical source is determined by the application, as for high speed fiber optic communication systems, the choice of the source should meet some basic requirements. The first requirement is the wavelength emitted must corresponding to low loss window for the fused silica, which is the most common type of optical fiber material, for instance, the 1.3um and 1.5um windows. This is vital as the fiber link often operate in form of long haul transmission without repeater. Under a specific level of optical power at the wavelength, large repeater spacing can be achieved by having a low loss fiber. The second requirement is to have high speed digital modulation. The technology of optical fiber communication system has reached the speed up to 40 GB/s and 100 GB/s. To achieve this, the light source required to be modulated at speed higher than 2.5 GB/s. to meet this requirement, two types of modulation technology have been develop.

The first type of modulation involves the direct modulation of light source at the desired speed. The second type is to use a LiNb03 external modulator where the light source is required to provide a steady power output. Next, the crucial characteristic of the light source is to have a small spectral linewidth. This will impact the magnitude of the dispersion which has a direct relationship to the linewidth of the source. Though there are various types of light source, but the light source that fulfill the above requirement and commonly used in fiber optic communication systems are either the light emitting diodes or laser diodes. Besides, they have high power efficiency, small size and many other useful features. LASER is monochromatic light source, conceptually; it is similar to and electronic oscillator. A laser is making up of an active medium that is capable of providing an optical resonator and optical amplification that provides the necessary optical feedback. For fiber optic communication system that requires bandwidth typically greater than 200 MHz, the ILD (semiconductor injection laser diode) is preferred rather than LED. Laser diode usually have spectral width of 2nm or less and have response times lesser than 1ns, and able to coupling an amount of miliwatts of useful luminescent power into the fiber that with small mode field diameters and small cores.

Figure 2 : The three key transition processes involved in laser action.

For LED, it is a forward biased p-n junction in which the process of spontaneous emission is carried out via the generation of optical radiation by the e-h recombination. The structure for both LED and laser diode are similar except for LED there is no cavity for feedback. [5], For optical communication systems requiring bit rates less than approximately 100-200Mb/s together with multimode filter coupled optical power in the tens of microwatts, semiconductor light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are usually the best light source. These LEDs require less complex drive circuitry than laser diodes since no thermal or optical stabilization circuits are needed and they can be fabricates with higher yields.

The fiber transmission medium consists of a multimode or single mode fiber for signal propagation. From the systems, points view, the singlemode fiber is less dispersive, can carry higher datda rates, and yield longer distance than multimode fiber. On the other hand, the multimode fiber is less expensive and can be used for shorter distance communications. Typically multimode fiber are around 0.8m, whereas the single mode fibers utilized at 1.3 and 1.55m wavelength. The systems links usually utilize optical amplifier, placed at regular intervals along the fiber, instead of conventional repeaters to compensate for the losses in a link, Additionally, an amplifier can be used as a booster for the transmitter or as a front end amplifier for the receiver. [2]

D. Transmission Detector

Figure 3 : (a) Electron re-combination and the associated photon emission for a direct-band-gap material; (b) electron re-combination for indirectband-gap materials requires a photon energy Eph and momentum kph. C. Transmission Link

Optical detectors functions as the opposites of the light emitters. The function is to convert the signal that is received in the form of lights into electrical signal that will be used to process the data, audio or video. The optical detector that is usually used is the semiconductor photodiode, which can produce current as the response of the incident light. Detectors work based on the usage of p-n junction. Incident ray of the photon that arrive into the diodes gives an electron in the valance band sufficient energy to go to conduction band, making a free electron and a hole. If the creation of the carriers happens in a depleted region, the carriers will quickly separate and create a current. However, in the fiber optic application, there is degradation from the signal that should be taken into account. This problem can be reduced by using low noise amplifier that will amplify the electrical signal to a suitable level for further processing.

III.

ANALYSIS

In 2005 at the Military Communication Conference, Gary Shaulov, Jigesh Patel, Brent Whitlock, Pablo Mena, and Robert Scarmozzio from RSoft Design Group has studied the simulation-assisted design of free space optical transmission systems. They demonstrated an example of system level design simulation of an FSO link in the weak-turbulence approximation for free-space channels by applying two simulation techniques which are; (1) parameter scan over the range of values for the additional attenuation; (2) statistical Monte-Carlo runs. They introduce the Free Space Optics (FSO), also known as wireless optical communications, is an emerging broadband technology that provide fast, secure and reliable data transmission. In FSO communications, optical transceivers communicate directly through the air to form point-to-point line-of-sight links. The transmitter converts the electrical signal to an optical one and sends it through the atmosphere. [6]

relatively mature and simple technology, function stability and WDM greatly compatible. In this paper, it is suggested that employing a lumped, under compensation, and postposition compensation scheme can improve the WDM+EDFA system transmission performance. There are many fiber optical transmission performances such as loss, dispersion and nonlinear characteristic. During the light pulses transmission, the distortion reduces the system performance. By using this systems loss and dispersion are the major which affected the fiberoptical communication being in high capacity develops. From the simulation the effect of dispersion compensation is very good. The signal quality is high, eye's shape is very good, the edge neat graph is symmetrical. And the effect of dispersion compensation is quite good[7]

Figure 5: The model of 4 40G / s WDM transmission system using DCF

IV. Figure 4: Free Space Optics (FSO) communication link

CONCLUSION

In 12 Jun 2009 at the Proceedings of the English conference on machine learning and cybernetics has studied about the computer simulation of optical fiber communication systems. In optical fiber communication systems, this journal wrote that wavelength division multiplexing technology is more widely used in communication. By using these systems, loss and dispersion are the major affect fiber-optical communication being the high capacity develops. DCF (Dispersion-compensation Fiber(DCF) technology gets extensive use for its large compensation band, the

The fundamental concept of the optical transmission system and the improvement done by the researcher has been investigated and explain in this paper properly. This paper also gives prime information regarding some idea of the optical transmission system that will be design later. V. REFERENCES John M. Senior, Optical Fiber Communication: Principle and practice, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall.

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Papannareddy, Rajappa, Introduction to Lightwave Communication System, Artech House, 1997. Harry J. R. Dutton, Understanding Optical Communications, IBM Corporation, September 1998. Gerd Keiser, Optical Fiber Communications, Fourth edition, McGraw Hill. Yao, Colin Fiber Optic Light Source for Optical Communication Systems. Fiber Optic Light Source for Optical Communication Systems. 27 Oct 2010. EzineArticles.co. 2 Apr. 2012. S. Gary, P. Jigesh, W. Brent, M. Pablo, S. Robert Simulation- Assisted Design Of Free Space Optical Transmission Systems, Military Communication Conference, 2005 Bo-Nng Hu, Lianhua, Rui-Mei Zhao, HuaWei Pang Computer Simulation of Optical Fiber Communication System,Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Baoding, 12-15 July 2009