Terabit Ethernet

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which was original developed for wireless communication technique for efficient spectrum utilization, has been successfully extended to optical transmission systems. One of key advantages is the OFDM-based technology has better tolerance to fiber dispersion and is expected to support high data-rate over a single channel through modulating multiple low-rate data streams on thousands of subcarriers. Many breakthroughs of the optical-coherent OFDM transmission technique have been reported. It has been able to support 100 Gb/s per channel data rate. Recently, there is another new breakthrough to transmit one terabit per second data rate on a single channel over 600 km SSMF fiber. Here is the link to access this technical paper from Optics Express.

Currently, most of the reported OFDM transmission experiments are using Matlab-based technique to generate multiple sub-stream data rates modulating on the subcarriers. Though the ASIC chips supporting OFDM are very mature in wireless communications, it is still challenging to extend the chip manufacturing technology to OFDM-based optical communications since the latter has much higher (x1000 times) transmission data rate than the former.