Communications of the ACM
Ten Times More Throughput on Optic Fibers
By reducing the amount of space between pulses of light, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne say they have dramatically increased the data capacity of optical fibers.
Credit: Jamani Caillet/EPFL
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) say they have achieved a dramatic increase in the capacity of optical fibers by reducing the amount of space required between the pulses of light that transport data. They say their research could increase the throughput of data in telecommunications systems by a factor of 10.
"Since it appeared in the 1970s, the data capacity of fiber optics has increased by a factor of 10 every four years, driven by a constant stream of new technologies, but for the last few years we've hit a sort of ceiling, and scientists all over the world are trying to break through," says EPFL's Camille Bres. The researchers examined the fundamental issue of how to process the light itself, an approach that would not entail a need to replace the entire optical fiber network as only the transmitters would need to be changed. The technology is based on a method that can produce what are known as Nyquist sinc pulses almost perfectly. "These pulses have a shape that's more pointed, making it possible to fit them together, a little bit like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle lock together," Bres says.
From Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
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