WDM Systems

Abstract

A communication system transmits and receives information from one place to another, where the separation between transmitter and receiver may be of few kilometers or transoceanic distances. Fiber-optic communication is one of such communication systems where optical fibers are deployed for information transmission. The capacity of a fiber-optic communication system is very high since it has large carrier frequency (Capacity~100 THz) in the visible or near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The transmission of multiple optical channels over the same fiber has provided a simple way to extend the system capacity. Channel multiplexing can be achieved through time-division multiplexing (TDM) or frequency division multiplexing (FDM). In optical communication, FDM is known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). This chapter includes the discussion about the working principle of the WDM system, WDM components, classification of WDM system, and other supporting technologies.

Optimal Spectrum Granularity for Spectrally-efficient Elastic Optical Networks

“…Recent researches have referred to EON to be a promising technique for effectively managing spectral resources which results in efficient utilization of spectrum. In flexible grid EON, a fixed 50 GHz International Telecommunications Union (ITU) grid channel is further split up into narrow width frequency slots (FSs) (50 GHz down to 1.5625 GHz) and contiguous FSs are assigned to the connection request depending on the required bandwidth and modulation format [4]- [5]. This flexible grid characteristic of EON provides absolute support to the applications where large and heterogeneous bandwidth is required such as e-science, cloud computing, and grid computing, etc [6]- [7].…”