Optical Fiber Communications

Optical fibers are used extensively for data transmission systems because of their dielectric nature and their large information-carrying capacity. Network architectures using multiple wavelength channels per optical fiber are utilized in local, metropolitan, or wide-area applications to connect thousands of users having a wide range of transmission capacities and speeds. A powerful aspect of an optical communication link is that many different wavelengths can be sent along a fiber simultaneously in the 1300-to-1600- nm spectrum. The technology of combining a number of wavelengths onto the same fiber is known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The concept of WDM used in conjunction with optical amplifiers has resulted in communication links that allow rapid communications between users in countries all over the world. Keywords: optical fibers; attenuation; photonic systems; WDM; optical amplifiers; dispersion; nonlinear effects