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.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-#
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."
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.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-#
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