Transmission of 100 Gb/s Ethernet-Over-Optical Demonstrated

killswitch83 · Post by **killswitch83** » Mon Oct 03, 2005 1:31 pm

Considering the ever-growing need of bandwidth for everything from gaming to large-scale networks, I found something that might be of interest to all, and is something I hope will be implemented sometime soon in the states:

Transmission of 100 Gb/s Ethernet-Over-Optical Demonstrated

Murray Hill, NJ - In two papers presented to the European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Scotland, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs announced the first reported transmissions of 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) Ethernet over optical. These results are a significant milestone in the industry's march towards migrating to 100Gb/s data networking.

"This work is a major first. We have broken through the ceiling in transmission rates and described two techniques that could help implement 100G Ethernet over optical systems," said Martin Zirngibl, director, Bell Labs. "With more and more enterprises moving to 10Gb/s transmission, carriers are looking to implement 100Gb/s Ethernet in the Metro Area Network (MAN) as a way to efficiently multiplex and transmit high amounts of data in its native Ethernet format."

Today, Ethernet signals are transported over 10Gb/s and, occasionally, over 40Gb/s SONET connections. This Bell Labs work is aimed at producing 100Gb/s Ethernet-over-optical transmission.

The Bell Labs research team was able to deliver a 107 Gb/s optical data stream, representing 100 Gb/s of data transmission plus a standard 7 percent overhead for error correction, using the following two technological approaches:

* Duobinary Signaling: This technique uses three electrical signal levels, - positive, negative and zero - to represent a binary signal for communications transmission. Duobinary signals require less bandwidth than traditional NRZ (non-return to zero) signals. The application of this bandwidth-compressing format enabled the creation of an optical 107-Gb/s serial data stream using a commercially available optical modulator (rated for 40 Gb/s).
* Single-Chip Optical Equalizer: Integrated optical equalizers invented by Bell Labs researchers two years ago, can compensate for transmission impairments and also for the limited modulator bandwidth in a commercially available NRZ system. NRZ is the least complex optical data format to generate. In order to demonstrate an optical 107-Gb/s NRZ signal, Bell Labs designed a single chip optical equalizer that compensated for almost all inter-symbol interference arising from modulator bandwidth limitations in an optical 107 Gb/s NRZ electronic time division multiplexing (ETDM) transmitter. As with the duobinary approach, Bell Labs researchers used a commercially available 40-Gb/s optical modulator in combination with the optical equalizer to generate a 107-Gb/s optical NRZ data stream.

Article can be found on this website

gvblake22 · Post by **gvblake22** » Mon Oct 03, 2005 6:14 pm

damn, that's actually pretty impressive. But how much $$ will something like this cost a typical home user like us? I don't think 100Gb/s optical data lines were part of the basic infrastructure of most cities...

killswitch83 · Post by **killswitch83** » Mon Oct 03, 2005 6:22 pm

I think this will be infrastructure-like connectivity (talking WAN's and MAN's here); then you would have 10GbE for trunk connection for ISP's, then maybe 1 Gbps speeds for individual hosts, which would be awesome if we could actually get that kind of throughput from our respective cable or DSL companies for cheap