Towards Maximizing Data Throughput on Subsea Fiber Optic Cables
Geoff Bennett, Director of Solutions & Technology, Infinera
With over 500 submarine fibre optic cables crisscrossing the world’s seas and oceans like a telecommunications patchwork, it has never been more important to understand the physical, technological and economical constraints dictating the amount of information that can be transmitted across them.
This presentation will give an overview of how subsea cable technology has changed over the last 20 years, and how improvements in transponder technology have allowed data throughput to both keep track and lead in an almost symbiotic manner, whilst in the face of unrelenting demand. In particular, we’ll use real-life deployment data to illustrate the flexibility of modern transponders and how modulation formats, symbol rates and compensation algorithms can all be adjusted to optimize throughput on both the oldest and most up-to-date examples of submarine wetplant technology.
PON made simple: fibre monitoring in the access
Sander Jansen, VP and General Manager for the Infrastructure Monitoring Business Unit, ADVA
Passive optical networks (PON) are rapidly becoming the dominant access technology for network operators. PON expansion is expected to account for approximately 50% of total access sales in 2023. One consequence of the PON network expansion is that more and more fibres are being deployed access. Glass fibres are very fragile and especially in access, where most fibre breaks happen, it is essential to be able to measure the integrity of the fibre optic network. In this presentation recent trends in fibre monitoring are discussed with focus on PON networks. What is needed to monitor PON networks in an effective way?
ROADM design and Routing for MCF-based Multi-Dimensional Optical Networks
Shuangyi Yan, High Performance Networks group, University of Bristol
Multiple core fibres (MCFs) provide a potential technology to further increase total fibre bandwidths to support the ever-increasing network traffic. The recent developments of MCF amplifiers and other technologies further leverage the feasibility of deploying MCFs in practical optical networks. However, switching and routing optical signals efficiently in multi-dimensional optical networks still face many challenges considering the availability of vast spectrum resources enabled by MCFs. In this talk, a SDM/WDM ROADM with dynamic core bypass is proposed and implemented with low port-count WSSs. Fibre-core bypassing reduces the number of and port-count of WSSs in the implementation. Dynamic bypass configuration allows network topology optimisation in a network level. Based on the ROADM design, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based routing algorithm is developed to maximise network throughput and resource utilisation, by avoiding spectrum fragmentation. The proposed solution requires less hardware without compromising on network performance with the developed routing core and wavelength assignment algorithm.