Paving the Optical Future with Affordable Lightning-fast Links
IST-FP6 STREP project n.027549








 

WP1

[WP1] [WP2] [WP3] [WP4] [WP5] [WP6] [WP7]

Objectives

WP1 starts in month 1 and ends in month 30.

The objective of this WP is the experimental demonstration of POF system transmission at 100 Mbit/s (for example to support Fast Ethernet) over long distances, i.e., above 200-300 meters.

Description of work

The objectives of this WP1 will be carried out through an extensive application of digital transmission techniques to POF systems, in order to increase the reach of 100 Mbit/s POF systems (Fast Ethernet) using one or more of the following advanced digital transmission techniques:

  • multilevel transmission, to reduce the required bandwidth on POF, but also on components, such as LED and A/D and D/A converters;
  • electronic pre- and post-equalization
  • Forward Error Correction (FEC) to counteract the sensitivity loss introduced by multilevel modulation

The WP technical strategy is to counteract the bandwidth limitations coming from TX-RX components and POF multimodal dispersion by using multilevel transmission and/or equalization, and to counteract the increased system margin required by multilevel using the coding gain of a suitable FEC. The main transmission problem to be overcome over long distance POF systems is bandwidth-limitation, together with the usual power-budget constraint. To this end, research activities will be focused on bandwidth efficient modulation formats. In particular, ISMB will mainly focus on baseband multilevel modulation (such as 4-PAM and 8-PAM) while TUE will work on phase-quadrature (I/Q) modulation (such as QPSK and multilevel QAM) and on the use of more than one wavelength to transport the digital quadrature signal.
The technical novelty of this WP will be in the selection and augmentation of techniques which as such are already available in other fields (in particular RF digital transmission), but have to be adapted to make these optimally suited for POF transmission.
These goals will be first investigated theoretically, then demonstrated over an FPGA platform equipped with A/D and D/A converters, and connected to a POF TX-RX systems. An FPGA platform will greatly ease the development process.
In a first phase, optoelectronic components for the TX-RX pair will be chosen among the best commercially available components. In a second phase, thanks to a strong interaction with WP3 and WP4, the experimental setup will be upgraded using components coming from WP3 and fibers coming from WP4. The interaction with these two WPs will be key to the success of WP1, since a great deal of power budget and bandwidth improvement shall be granted by components and fibers’ optimization.
The technologies developed in this WP could transform in a product for industrial applications. Even if an ASIC implementation is outside the scope of this project, a cost analysis of it will anyway be carried out.

This WP will be led by ISMB, and will be carried out together with TUE. Together they will develop, measure and test the prototype system. LUCEAT shall participate by providing its expertise on long distance POF systems, and on ad-hoc fibers. Strong interactions will occur with POFAC, for the fiber optimization (WP4) and FHG, DieMount and STM for the component optimization (WP3).

 

POF-ALL Project
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Last change: 28/07/2008 11.55.36