- Advanced Technology Laboratories
KDDI Research members win 2022 IEEE Photonics Technology Letters Best Paper Award
—Draw out the potential capacity of existing deployed optical fiber cables—
November 21, 2022
University College London
Xtera, Inc.
KDDI Research, Inc.
A paper, Optical Fibre Capacity Optimisation via Continuous Bandwidth Amplification and Geometric Shaping*1, authored by UCL (TRANSNET*2, UK), Xtera (UK&US), and KDDI Research has won the IEEE Photonics Technology Letters Best Paper Award*3. The paper reported a record capacity of 178.08 Tb/s in a standard optical fiber achieved in an advanced high-capacity optical fiber transmission experiment using an ultra-wide continuous waveband of 16.83 THz across S+C+L-band*4.
The majority of high capacity optical fiber transmission systems are designed based solely on C-band (approximately 1530-1565 nm). To increase capacity, transmission systems using L-band (approximately 1570-1610 nm) in addition to C-band have already been commercialized. In the awarded paper, S-band (approximately 1485-1520 nm) was employed in conjunction with C+L-band. Moreover, Raman amplification was introduced to fill gaps between wavebands (approximately 5-10 nm) and to expand the operational waveband to ~1620 nm, resulting in an ultra-wide waveband of +23% from a precedent work*5. Furthermore, an advanced modulation format with geometric constellation shaping*6 was employed to maximize the throughput for wavelength channels. By expanding the waveband and tailoring the modulation format, the unused potential capacity of existing optical fiber was made available. This technology is expected to draw out the potential capacity of existing optical fiber cables.
The experiments were conducted in UCL. KDDI Research worked on digital signal processing and contributed to maximizing the capacity by high quality reconstruction of geometrically shaped signals.
The award presentation was held at IEEE Photonics Conference (IPC) in Vancouver, Canada, on November 14, 2022.
KDDI and KDDI Research have developed a next-generation society concept "KDDI Accelerate 5.0" for the year 2030 and have written a white paper on how to make this concept a reality using both the "future vision" and "technology" considered necessary to foster an ecosystem for innovation in the beyond 5G/6G era.
KDDI and KDDI Research will promote research and development of seven technologies and a corresponding orchestration technology to achieve a novel lifestyle. The results of this demonstration fall under the "Network" category of the seven technologies.
*1 Lidia Galdino/UCL, Adrian Edwards/Xtera, Wenting Yi/UCL, Eric Sillekens/UCL, Yuta Wakayama/KDDI Research, Thomas Gerard/UCL, Wayne Sheldon Pelouch/Xtera, Stuart Barnes/Xtera, Takehiro Tsuritani/KDDI Research, Robert I. Killey/UCL, Domaniç Lavery/UCL, and Polina Bayvel/UCL, “Optical Fibre Capacity Optimisation via Continuous Bandwidth Amplification and Geometric Shaping,” IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, vol. 32, no. 17, pp. 1021-1024, September 2020.
*2 A research project led by University College London (UCL) in collaboration with Aston University and University of Cambridge aiming at creating an adaptive intelligent optical network.
*3 The 2022 IEEE Photonics Technology Letters Best Paper Award is awarded to two papers among ~1200 papers published in the IEEE Photonics Technology Letters during the previous three calendar years.
*4 ITU-T defines wavelength ranges of S-, C-, and L-band as 1460-1530 nm, 1530-1565 nm, and 1565-1625 nm, respectively, in G.Sup39 (Optical system design and engineering considerations). In optical fiber transmission systems, available waveband is limited by the operational wavelengths of optical devices, such as a laser and optical amplifier.
*5 F. Hamaoka, et al., “150.3-Tb/s Ultra-Wideband (S, C, and L Bands) Single-Mode Fibre Transmission over 40-km Using >519Gb/s/A PDM-128QAM Signals,” ECOC2018, 2018.
*6 An optimization technique for maximizing transmission throughput by mapping constellation points. A related topic, “A New Record of 2048-QAM Transmission over Optical Fiber with COTS Devices,” was released on June 29 2021
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