A Novel Multiclad Single Mode Optical Fibers for Broadband Optical Networks

Abstract

The demand for data communication is growing rapidly due to the increasing popularity of the Internet and other factors [1]. The unprecedented success of information technology in recent years ushers an explosive growth in demand for the Internet access in the 21st century. Ultra-wideband transmission media are needed in order to provide high-speed communications for a much larger number of users. A promising solution to the capacity crunch can come from wavelength-division-multiplexed optical fiber communication systems that are shown to provide enormous capacities on the order of terabit per second over long distances. These systems utilize single-mode fibers, in conjunction with erbiumdoped fiber amplifiers, as the transmission medium [2]. The optical silica fiber might be the only proper choice to realize this task. Optical fiber based communication is the excellent alternative for these purposes which needs low dispersion as well as dispersion slope and large bandwidth supported by optical physical medium[3]. Optical transmission began to be used in trunk cables about 1990; the capacity of those systems was several hundred Mbit/s per fiber. The capacity jumped to 2.5 (5.0) Gbit/s per fiber with the introduction of optical repeaters using erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in 1995. It jumped again in 1998, to 10 (20) Gbit/s per fiber, with the introduction of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) [5]. Overall transmission capacity now exceeds 100 Gbit/s per fiber due to improvements in WDM techniques [6]. Usually, those techniques are called dense WDM (DWDM). In recent years, the increasing demands for transmission capacity have led to intense research activities on high capacity DWDM communication system [7]. Nowadays, applications such as optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) are usual tasks in industry [1]. Therefore by considering these applications, providing a large bandwidth and high-speed communication possibility using optical fibers is highly interesting [3]. In the following, we review requirements for DWDM, Dispersion properties, optical nonlinearity, loss properties, and design of optical fiber for DWDM.