Topic: Optical MIMO to Overcome the Optical Networks Capacity Crunch
Speaker: Dr. Peter Winzer
Head, Optical Transmission Systems and Networks Research Department Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ, USA
Date: 20th November 2015
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Venue: R1206, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
With network traffic growing exponentially between about 30% and 60% per year, depending on application segment and geography, fiber-optic transport networks are rapidly approaching their fundamental Shannon capacity limits. By 2020, leading-edge network operators will require capacities that are physically impossible to implement using conventional optical transmission technologies. Of all five physical dimensions that can be used for information transmission by electromagnetic waves, “space” is the one not yet exploited in optical systems. Introducing parallelism in the spatial domain (i.e., Space-Division Multiplexing, SDM) is thus the only long-term viable solution on the horizon to overcome the optical networks capacity crunch. In this talk we will examine long-term optical capacity scaling solutions using SDM. We will explore the implications of ultimately unavoidable spatial crosstalk and its mitigation through multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) digital signal processing. We will highlight important differences of optical MIMO with selective mode excitation and wireless MIMO systems. We will also discuss new avenues for high-throughput physical-layer security systems based on optical MIMO-SDM.
