Exploiting the Attenuation of Fiber-Optic Passive Taps to Create Large High-Capacity LAN's and MAN's

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9 Scopus citations

Abstract

The attenuation associated with passive fiber-optic cou- plers is usually considered to be completely undesirable, restricting the size of a linear tapped-bus network, for example, to tens of nodes. In this paper, we propose a local- or metropolitan-area network (LAN or MAN) that exploits the power losses of fiber-optic passive taps so that wavelengths can be reused in different portions of the network (i.e., spatial reuse). This wavelength reuse makes it possible to design a large, high-capacity, multichannel network with many concurrent transmissions. An arbitrary number of nodes is supported by allowing packets to take multiple hops, when necessary, to reach their destinations. In one example configuration, there are two closed circular loops of fiber: one for transmissions in the clockwise direction and one for counter-clockwise transmissions. Each node has one passive tap (per fiber), which is used for both a fixed-wavelength transmitter and a fixed-wavelength receiver. Assuming a 30-dB link power budget, ideal 11-dB couplers, and a 1-Gbps transmission rate, the network capacity is 96 Gbps for a uniform traffic model and an infinite number of nodes. Even with an arbitrarily large number of nodes, 24 wavelengths (reused multiple times around each fiber loop) is sufficient to maintain a 10-9 bit-error rate (BER) with less than 0.5-dB power penalty (to compensate for the interference).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)400-408
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Lightwave Technology
Volume9
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 1991

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