Cost-Effective Transmission Concept for LAN/MAN/SAN Applications

We demonstrate error-free 4×10 Gbit/s 1310 nm DWDM simplified-design transmission over 200 km of standard single mode fibre without any dispersion compensation using SOAs. Introduction Recently, optical communication systems operating at multi-Gbit/s, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet are becoming increasingly important in local area networks (LANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs) and storage are networks (SAN) [1]. The applied network solutions must be cost-effective since the network cost is shared by a small number of network users. For such medium distance networks, the standard single mode fibre (SSMF) (installed) infrastructure operating at 1310 nm offers a serious alternative for realizing cost-effective and highcapacity multi-Gbit/s systems, alleviating any need for dispersion compensation for the considered distances and bit rates. This particular feature is very important for the 10 Gbit/s systems operating at distances higher than 100 km, where the 1550 nm wavelength domain based systems require dispersion compensation, which increases the system cost and complexity. Semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) provide cost-effective optical amplification for the systems operating in the 1310 nm wavelength domain. Demonstrated 1310 nm semiconductor based wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems operated at the distance below 100 km [2-3], therefore not fully exploiting advantages of the transmission in the 1310 nm transmission window. In this paper, we significantly increase the transmission reach of the 1310 WDM transmission systems, while remaining cost-effective. We demonstrate an error-free 4×10 Gbit/s 1310 nm dense WDM (DWDM) transmission using SOAs over 200 km of standard single mode fibre without any dispersion compensation. The whole system has simplified, cost-effective design. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, we have reached a transmission record of WDM transmission distance in the 1310 transmission window [2-4]. Moreover, unlike in [2-4], the WDM channels were equally spaced, which in general simplifies system design and network management issues. The presented results demonstrate that the existing 1310 nm SOA technology can significantly extend the reach of 1310 nm transmission systems and undoubtedly support metro-distance DWDM transmission. Therefore, the network architecture scenarios can be extended with the medium distance multi-Gbit/s and multiwavelength transmission systems operating in the 1310 nm wavelength domain. λ1 IM 10 Gbit/s SOA 1