From scaling disparities to integrated parallelism: Space-division multiplexing in fiber-optic communications

Abstract: The evolution of network traffic and communication technologies over the past 10+ years and their projections into the coming 10+ years reveal increasingly pronounced scaling disparities between technologies used to create and process data and technologies used to transport data. In core networks, we expect the need for 10+ Terabit/s transponders working over Petabit/s systems within the coming decade. However, with the help of digital coherent detection, advanced multi-dimensional modulation, shaping, and coding, these systems are now rapidly approaching recently established estimates for the Shannon capacity of the nonlinear fiber-optic channel. By 2020, leading-edge network operators will require capacities that are physically impossible to implement using conventional optical transmission technologies. Highly integrated spatially parallel optical transmission solutions (Space-Division Multiplexing, SDM) seem to be the only long-term viable path to overcome the looming optical networks capacity crunch. We discuss the implications of ultimately unavoidable spatial crosstalk in highly parallel SDM systems and examine how multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) digital signal processing, well established in wireless communications (albeit on a different set of boundary conditions), can be used to scale optical core networks.

Biography: Peter J. Winzer received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, in 1998. Supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), he investigated photon-starved space-borne Doppler lidar and laser communications using high-sensitivity digital modulation and detection. At Bell Labs since 2000, he has focused on various aspects of high-bandwidth fiber-optic communication systems, including Raman amplification, advanced optical modulation formats, multiplexing schemes, and receiver concepts, digital signal processing and coding, as well as on robust network architectures for dynamic data services. He contributed to several high-speed and high-capacity optical transmission records with interface rates from 10 Gb/s to 1 Tb/s, including the first 100G and the first 400G electronically multiplexed optical transmission systems and the first field trial of live 100G video traffic over an existing carrier network. Since 2008 he has been investigating and internationally promoting spatial multiplexing as a promising option to scale optical transport systems beyond the capacity limits of single-mode fiber. He currently heads the Optical Transmission Systems and Networks Research Department at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. He has widely published and patented and is actively involved in technical and organizational tasks with the IEEE Photonics Society and the Optical Society of America (OSA), currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. He has been Program Chair of the 2009 European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) and Program Chair and General Chair of the 2015 and 2017 Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC). Dr. Winzer is a Bell Labs Fellow, a Fellow of the IEEE and the OSA, and a 2015 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher, the only one from industry in Engineering.