Internet Bandwidth To Get The Boost - New Fibre Optics Technology At Work

With the ever-increasing use of the Internet data traffic, thanks to growing number of internet powered devices - be it smartphone or tablets or laptops, we have reached a situation where a breakthrough in the internet bandwidth i.e. the amount of data per second that can be transmitted across a channel, is the most in demand. As the internet usage continues to soar, this all new fiber optic technology developed by Engineering Professor Siddharth Ramachandran from Boston University could our ray of hope. Imagine a day when there is no network congestion and video streaming is fast as the blink of your eye. That's what our future could be. Published in the Science journal, this research work by Ramachandran and collaborators from University of Southern California, OFS-Fitel (a fiber optics company in Denmark) and Tel Aviv University, uses donut-shaped laser light beams called optical vortices, in which the light twists like a tornado as it moves along the beam path, rather than in a straight line. They have developed an optical fibre that can propagate these optical vortices, that were previously thought to be unstable in fiber.

Working under the Information in a Photon (InPho) program, this project was funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). "For several decades since optical fibers were deployed, the conventional assumption has been that OAM-carrying beams are inherently unstable in fibers," said Ramachandran. "Our discovery, of design classes in which they are stable, has profound implications for a variety of scientific and technological fields that have exploited the unique properties of OAM-carrying light, including the use of such beams for enhancing data capacity in fibers."

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How is his method revolutionary, one may ask. Well, since its conception, the traditional way of enhancing the Internet bandwidth has been by increasing the number of colors, or wavelengths of data-carrying laser signals sent down an optical fiber, where the signals are processed according to color. But now, since the number is reaching physical limits, the emerging strategy to boost bandwidth is to send the light through a fiber along distinctive paths, or modes, each carrying a cache of data from one end of the fiber to the other. Ramachandran’s approach combines both strategies,packing several colors into each mode, and using multiple modes.

In experiments appearing in the Science paper, Ramachandran and his collaborators created an OAM fiber with four modes (an optical fiber typically has two), and showed that for each OAM mode, they could send data through a one-kilometer fiber in 10 different colors, resulting in a transmission capacity of 1.6 terabits per second. That’s the equivalent of being able to transmit eight Blu-RayTM DVDs every second.

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  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare

    @abrakadabra • Jun 28, 2013

    Last year in the journal Nature Photonics, Willner and his team had described a way to use these helical twists of light to transmit data. But in their experiments, the signal traveled through free space over a short distance – not an easy model to translate into modern communication networks. Maintaining a swirling yet stable vortex of light in a fiber was thought to be improbable – until now.

    To keep the light spinning, the researchers strategically coated parts of the inside of the fiber with certain elements – germanium and fluorine, in particular. Those elements alter the refractive index within the cable, changing the angle at which the laser signal is reflected. Think of it as similar to the rifling inside of a gun barrel – except that while the grooves inside a gun create the spin of a bullet, the fiber’s design works to maintain an already existing spin.

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  • Ashraf HZ
    Ashraf HZ

    @Ash • Jun 28, 2013

    Well.. as much as we are putting effort in increasing capacity of transmission links, it wont be much if routers can't process these data fast enough 😛

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  • Kaustubh Katdare
    Kaustubh Katdare

    @thebigk • Jun 28, 2013

    ashWell.. as much as we are putting effort in increasing capacity of transmission links, it wont be much if routers can't process these data fast enough 😛

    Valid point; I think just like 5G this technology will take several years before making it to mainstream. By then we'll have routers capable of handling all the bandwidth available.

    I sometimes wonder whether researchers should really invest in high-speed data transmission over longer distances (hundreds of kilometers). Instead, I firmly believe that more research should be put into developing wireless technologies so that we truly go wire-free in the next 2 decades.

    Or do we have known limitations on how much data can be transferred over the wireless networks, theoretical, it may be at present.

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  • Ashraf HZ
    Ashraf HZ

    @Ash • Jun 28, 2013

    Kaustubh KatdareI sometimes wonder whether researchers should really invest in high-speed data transmission over longer distances (hundreds of kilometers).

    They should still dedicate research ways to increase bandwidth for backhaul, because in the end, you still need big pipes to cater to the increased demand for data (e.g with LTE, microwave back haul links will struggle, should swap to fiber). However, it should not be limited to transmission alone, meaning you need to take into account the aggregation and core elements of the network.

    Or do we have known limitations on how much data can be transferred over the wireless networks, theoretical, it may be at present.

    I suppose we can say the limitation follows the Shannon–Hartley theorem, where channel capacity is bound by bandwidth and SNR.

    We got as close to the Shannon limit with LDPC & Turbo codes for error efficiency, so more focus is now on developments in antenna technologies, spectral efficiency, using more bandwidth (including re-farming and possibility white spaces). We can play around with TX power, but these days we are supposed to be reducing battery usage.. hence that could be another limitation.

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