PROTOMI

Adaptive Technology in Optical Transmission

This research is co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program THALIS.

The Protomi Project

Improving the performance of electronic and optoelectronic components and systems has enabled the investigation of data rates greater than 10 and 40 Gb/s. However there is no clear picture of the preferred technology for transmitting multiple channels over long distance (hundreds of kilometers) as needed in a backbone network. Indeed, several of the proposed solutions require significant development of electronic technology to be applicable (e.g., polarization multiplexing transmission requires complex and expensive signal processing at the receiver). Furthermore, increasing the capacity of the channel has to deal with increasingly complex fiber phenomena.

Another important challenge is the economically feasible upgrade of existing channels from10 Gb/s without changing the transmission infrastructure. For this purpose, advanced modulation techniques promise to increase the information content of channels with better reliability. Adaptive optics and electronics systems are also needed in order to improve the performance of lines designed for 10 Gb/s to allow higher rates with acceptable quality. The electronic systems improve the quality of individual channels and the adaptive optics systems improve the quality for individual channels and multichannel systems by modifying the interactions between channels. Meanwhile in the context of wavelength routed optical networks where spectrally adjacent WDM channels that may have crossed different routes to interconnect the same source destination nodes, adaptive transmission systems may become vital.

Objective

The fundamental objective of the project is to study techniques of optical transmission combined with optical and electronic equalization in order to implement backbone networks with extremely low cost per transmitted bit, and to develop the optical and electronic components to ensure low cost optical networks.