Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. said it has achieved all optically regenerated transmission, which enables unlimited transmission of 160-Gbit/s optical signals with a single wavelength. To do so, OKI developed an all-optical 3R Regenerator, which uses a specialized optical-repeater technology with functions for reamplification, reshaping to remove optical signal wave distortion, and retiming to avoid timing-jitter accumulation. In theory, the system can achieve signal processing speeds of over 200 Gbits/s.
In a conventional optical communication system, an optical amplifier is placed every 50 to 100 km to compensate for propagation loss. Because signal distortion and timing jitter accumulate during transmission, the faster the speed of transmission, the shorter the transmission range. To increase transmission distances, optical signals are converted into electric signals before the transmission limit is reached and converted back into optical signals and then re-transmitted after the signal processing is completed. However, the speed for such batch signal processing is currently limited to 40 Gbit/s.
Oki’s all-optical system was demonstrated using an optical test-bed provided by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology’s Japan Gigabit Network II (JGN II). The research project was conducted under the auspices of NICT.
“This result proves that we can now transmit data at 160 Gbits/s—a speed equivalent to transmitting four movies, approximately 8 hours of data—in a single second,” said Takeshi Kamijo, general manager of Oki’s corporate R&D center. “This amount of data at this speed can be sent over distances greater than the length of Japan, which is about 3000 km, and in fact to the other side of the planet, which is about 20,000 km.” Kamijo said the technology is expected to be commercialized in 2010 or after. First, OKI will analyze the findings from the field trial and develop a commercial-level 160-Gbit/s optical 3R Regenerator.
Oki Electric Industry
www.oki.com
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