Optical techniques for broadband in-building networks

Abstract

Optical fibres, which can easily handle any bandwidth demand, have been rolled out to more than 32 million consumer’s homes and professional buildings worldwide up to 2010. The basic technological and economical challenges of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) has been solved. The current FTTH technology can now providing baseband Gbit Ethernet and high definition TV services to the gates of homes. Thus, the bottleneck for delivery of broadband services to the end users is shifting from the access network to the in-building network. In the meantime, the need for high-capacity transmission between devices inside the building, e.g. between desktop PC and data services, are also rapidly increase. How to bring high bandwidth to the mobile terminals such as laptops, PDAs or cell phones as well as to the fixed terminals such as desktop PCs and HDTV equipment in an all-in-one network infrastructure is a challenge we are facing. Building on the flexibility of the wireless access networks and the latent vast bandwidth of a fibre infrastructure, radio-over-fibre (RoF) techniques have been proposed as a cost-effective solution to the future integrated broadband services in in-building networks. This thesis investigates techniques to deliver high data rate wireless services via in-building networks: high capacity RoF links employing optical frequency multiplication (OFM) and sub-carrier multiplexing (SCM) techniques, with single- or multi-carrier signal formats. The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) format is investigated for the RoF transmission system, particularly with regard to the optical system nonlinearity. For low-cost short-range optical backbone networks, RoF transmission over large-core diameter plastic optical fibre (POF) links has been studied, including the transmission of the WiMedia-compliant multiband OFDM UWB signal over bandwidth-limited large-core POF as well as a full-duplex bi-directional UWB transmission over POF. In order to improve the functionalities for delivery of wireless services of in-building networks, techniques to introduce flexibility into the network architecture and to create dynamic capacity allocation have been investigated. By employing optical switching techniques based on optical semiconductor amplifiers (SOA), an optically routed RoF system has been studied. The dynamic capacity allocation is addressed by investigating one-dimensional and two-dimensional routing using electrical SCM and optical wavelengths. In addition, next to RoF networking, this thesis explores techniques for wired delivery of baseband high capacity services over POF links by employing a multi-level signal modulation format, in particular discrete multi-tone (DMT) modulation. Transmission of 10 Gbit/s data over 1 mm core diameter PMMA POF links is demonstrated, as a competitor to more expensive fibre solutions such as silica single and multimode fibre. A record transmission rate of more than 40 Gbit/s is presented for POF whose core diameter is comparable with silica multimode fibre. Finally, from the network perspective, the convergence of wired and wireless multi-standard services into a single fibre-based infrastructure has been studied. Techniques have been designed and demonstrated for in-building networks, which can convey both high capacity baseband services and broadband radio frequency (RF) services over a POF backbone link. The multi-standard RoF signals carry different wireless services at different radio frequencies and with different bandwidths, including WiFi, WiMax, UMTS and UWB. System setups to carry them together over the same multimode optical fibre based network have been designed and experimentally shown. All the concepts, designs and system experiments presented in this thesis underline the strong potential of multimode (silica and plastic) optical fibre techniques for the delivery of broadband services to wired and wireless devices in in-building networks, in order to extend to the end user the benefits of the broadband FTTH networks which are being installed and deployed worldwide.