Novel transmission formats hold the potential for large increases in the total system capacity of optical fiber transmission systems. At high bit-rates, however, nonlinear and stochastic physical effects contribute to limit the overall system performance. The deterministic impairments are mainly due to the combination of nonlinearity and dispersion. The stochastic impairments occur due to amplifier noise (which induces amplitude, timing and phase fluctuations) as well as polarization-mode dispersion. All of these effects produce impairments which lead to unacceptable rates of transmission errors. However, the large scale and complexity of these systems, the variety of effects involved, and the extremely low bit-error-ratios required of these systems (which requires studying the occurrence of extremely rare events) all contribute to make the modeling of optical fiber communications a challenging task. Recent work has demonstrated that careful mathematical and computational modeling can be very effective in describing the behavior of realistic optical fiber transmission systems. This research project aims at evaluating the potential of new transmission formats and assessing how each of them is affected by the various transmission impairments. The methods that will be developed in this project are expected to make an impact on how these systems are modeled and designed. In addition, because new ultra-short pulse lasers share many similarities with dispersion-managed optical transmission systems, the mathematical techniques that will be developed as part of this research project will help researchers understand the behavior of these lasers and their fundamental limits.
The development of high-capacity optical fiber communications has been a major technological advance that enabled the widespread use of the internet and the world-wide-web which revolutionized our day-to-day interactions. The demand for further increase in the total transmission capacity remains unabated, however, fueled by emerging applications such as video-on-demand, video-conferencing and others requiring very large bandwidths. A key feature of this collaborative research project is the combined use of sophisticated mathematical and computational methods to model the behavior of realistic lightwave systems, with the aim of developing the accurate tools which are needed to efficiently study the behavior of optical fiber transmission systems and to design the next generation of systems. As such, the outcome of this project will contribute to strengthening the national infrastructure and maintaining U.S. competitiveness in an area which is of great national interest, thus benefiting not just researchers, but also the community at large.
