A Swiss group of researchers has developed a method that multiplies by ten the bandwidth of optical fiber to reduce the space between the fiber light pulses carrying information, allowing moving more data in less time.
The main innovation of this technology is its concept based on the use of light and to apply it is only necessary to change the source station, while other existing alternatives to speed up the optical fiber involve changing the entire infrastructure, with consequent cost.
The technology of optical fiber carries information via light pulses traveling so far ‘in single file’, which meant leaving unused spaces between each other to avoid interference.
Scientists at the Polytechnic School of the Lausanne University (EPFL, in French) in Switzerland have devised a method by which it is possible to partially overlap these light pulses as puzzle pieces and take advantage of spaces that were previously not used to carry more information, which allows exploiting the full capacity of the fiber.
This method allows almost perfectly produce these light pulses called Nyquist, which solves the problem of the occurrence of interference.
“These impulses together in a ‘puzzle’ have the ability to bind with each other, making interfering with each other, but not at the precise site where the information is encoded,” said in a statement the group member for fiber optics (GFO) of EPFL, Camille Bres.
A puzzle
The idea of using light pulses in “puzzle” to improve the capacity of the optical fiber is not new, but until now nobody had managed to carry it out without using sophisticated infrastructure.
EPFL scientists have created a laser and a modulator which got a perfect light pulses to 99%, a result never achieved by other technologies.
This technology only has the disadvantage that it will not be possible to further intensify in the future traffic information, as if the light pulses are emitted with closely spaced could not convey the information correctly.
In modern communication systems, as the exchange of information between two mobile phones, data is transported from one antenna to another through optical fiber by lit luminous pulses that are equivalent to the number one and are off which correspond to zero.
This process is a binary code consisting of a list of ones and zeros that allows the receiver to decode the original message.