Ultra-long haul submarine transmission

Crossing the oceans with an optical fiber capable of transmitting tens of millions of voice communications… this is the technical challenge faced by the transmission system suppliers! The recent technological progress achieved in the field of fiber optics has permitted, within the past 5 years, to multiply by 20 the capacity supported by a single fiber over transoceanic distances. Based on the concatenation of erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA), these high-capacity transmission systems take benefit from the huge potential of the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technique enabling transmission of several wavelengths on a single optical fiber. As a result, current transoceanic systems are capable of transmitting more than a hundred wavelengths, each wavelength being modulated at a bit rate of 100 Gbit/s. For that purpose, the optical amplification bandwidth of the EDFAs has been extended through a complex process of gain equalization. In addition, a careful management of the line fiber chromatic dispersion has been required to reduce the channel interactions induced by the nonlinear effects occurring along the propagation. Finally, the configuration of the terminal station has been drastically modified to include a new generation of error-correcting codes as well as an appropriate modulation format. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the main technical evolution that has enabled the laying of the last 10 Gbit/s WDM transoceanic links, as well as to introduce the new technologies considered for higher capacity systems.

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