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ZTE Communications ›› 2012, Vol. 10 ›› Issue (1): 1-2.

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Guest Editorial of 100G and Beyond: Trends in Ultrahigh-Speed Communications (Part I)

Gee-Kung Chang1, Jianjun Yu2, Xiang Wang3   

  1. 1. Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
    2. ZTE USA, USA
    3. ZTE Corporation, China
  • Online:2012-03-25 Published:2012-03-25
  • About author:Gee-Kung Chang received his PhD degree in physics from the University of California, Riverside. He worked for 23 years at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bell Systems-Bell Labs, and then Bellcore), where he held research and management positions, including director and chief scientist of optical internet research, director of optical networking systems and testbed, and director of optical system integration and network interoperability. Prior to joining Georgia Institute of Technology, he was vice president and chief technology strategist at OpNext Inc., an offshoot of Hitachi Telecom. Dr. Chang is currently the Byers endowed chair professor of optical networking at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is an eminent scholar of the Georgia Research Alliance. He is also co-director of the 100G Optical Networking Center at Georgia Tech. He holds 56 U.S. patents and has co-authored more than 360 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He was made a Telcordia Fellow in 1999 for pioneering work in the optical networking project, MONET, and NGI. He was made a fellow of the Photonic Society of Chinese-Americans in 2000. He is a fellow of the IEEE Photonics Society and a fellow of the Optical Society of America, recognized for his contributions to DWDM optical networking and label switching technologies. He has served at many IEEE LEOS and OSA conferences. He has been the lead guest editor for three special issues of the Journal of Lightwave Technology, which is sponsored by IEEE LEOS and OSA.

    Jianjun Yu (yu.jianjun@zte.com.cn) received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 1999. From June 1999 to January 2001, he was an assistant research professor at the Research Center COM, Technical University of Denmark. From February 2001 to December 2002, he was a member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies and Agere Systems, Murray Hill, NJ. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in January 2003 as a research faculty member and director of the Optical Network Laboratory. From November 2005 to February 2010, he was a senior member of technical staff at NEC Laboratories America, Princeton, NJ. Currently, he works for ZTE Corporation as the chief scientist on high-speed optical transmission and director of optics labs in North America. He is also a chair professor at Fudan University and adjunct professor and PhD supervisor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and Hunan University. He has authored more than 100 papers for prestigious journals and conferences. Dr. Yu holds 8 U.S. patents with 30 others pending. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is editor-in-chief of Recent Patents on Engineering and an associate editor for the Journal of Lightwave Technology and Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. Dr. Yu was a technical committee member at IEEE LEOS from 2005 to 2007 and a technical committee member of OFC from 2009 to 2011.

    Xiang Wang received his BSc degree in computer science from Nanjing University in 1991, and MSc degree in electronic engineering from Southeast University in 1997. He joined ZTE Corporation in 1997 and has led the planning, designing, R&D and product managing of programmable swithes, wired network products, softswitch products, and service software products. Several products he and his team had developed won multiple national awards. He has rich experience and deep understanding of development of the communications industry. He is now a vice president of ZTE Corporation, taking charge of overall technical strategies, R&D, and platform and architecture designing of wired products.

Guest Editorial of 100G and Beyond: Trends in Ultrahigh-Speed Communications (Part I)

Gee-Kung Chang1, Jianjun Yu2, Xiang Wang3   

  1. 1. Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
    2. ZTE USA, USA
    3. ZTE Corporation, China
  • 作者简介:Gee-Kung Chang received his PhD degree in physics from the University of California, Riverside. He worked for 23 years at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bell Systems-Bell Labs, and then Bellcore), where he held research and management positions, including director and chief scientist of optical internet research, director of optical networking systems and testbed, and director of optical system integration and network interoperability. Prior to joining Georgia Institute of Technology, he was vice president and chief technology strategist at OpNext Inc., an offshoot of Hitachi Telecom. Dr. Chang is currently the Byers endowed chair professor of optical networking at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is an eminent scholar of the Georgia Research Alliance. He is also co-director of the 100G Optical Networking Center at Georgia Tech. He holds 56 U.S. patents and has co-authored more than 360 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He was made a Telcordia Fellow in 1999 for pioneering work in the optical networking project, MONET, and NGI. He was made a fellow of the Photonic Society of Chinese-Americans in 2000. He is a fellow of the IEEE Photonics Society and a fellow of the Optical Society of America, recognized for his contributions to DWDM optical networking and label switching technologies. He has served at many IEEE LEOS and OSA conferences. He has been the lead guest editor for three special issues of the Journal of Lightwave Technology, which is sponsored by IEEE LEOS and OSA.

    Jianjun Yu (yu.jianjun@zte.com.cn) received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 1999. From June 1999 to January 2001, he was an assistant research professor at the Research Center COM, Technical University of Denmark. From February 2001 to December 2002, he was a member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies and Agere Systems, Murray Hill, NJ. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in January 2003 as a research faculty member and director of the Optical Network Laboratory. From November 2005 to February 2010, he was a senior member of technical staff at NEC Laboratories America, Princeton, NJ. Currently, he works for ZTE Corporation as the chief scientist on high-speed optical transmission and director of optics labs in North America. He is also a chair professor at Fudan University and adjunct professor and PhD supervisor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and Hunan University. He has authored more than 100 papers for prestigious journals and conferences. Dr. Yu holds 8 U.S. patents with 30 others pending. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is editor-in-chief of Recent Patents on Engineering and an associate editor for the Journal of Lightwave Technology and Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. Dr. Yu was a technical committee member at IEEE LEOS from 2005 to 2007 and a technical committee member of OFC from 2009 to 2011.

    Xiang Wang received his BSc degree in computer science from Nanjing University in 1991, and MSc degree in electronic engineering from Southeast University in 1997. He joined ZTE Corporation in 1997 and has led the planning, designing, R&D and product managing of programmable swithes, wired network products, softswitch products, and service software products. Several products he and his team had developed won multiple national awards. He has rich experience and deep understanding of development of the communications industry. He is now a vice president of ZTE Corporation, taking charge of overall technical strategies, R&D, and platform and architecture designing of wired products.

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Abstract: Fiber optics underpins the communication infrastructure of today’s information society. Rapid progress in advanced modulation formats, high-gain coding, optical amplification, coherent detection with digital signal processing, and new types of transmission fibers have significantly affected optical communications. Increasing transmission capacity and bit rate per channel is the trend for optical transmission systems and networks. Commercial transmission capacity has increased more than one hundred thousand times since the first optical transmission system was deployed in the 1980s. Spectral efficiency of a single channel has increased from 0.025 b/s/Hz to 2 b/s/Hz. Bit rate per channel for commercial products has increased from 155 Mb/s to more than 100 Gb/s. Larger capacity is driven by the proliferation of broadband FTTH access networks, broadband wireless communications, and high-speed data communication systems in data centers and high performance computing. High bit rate per channel simplifies the management of complex optical networks. Although 100G is just the beginning of the commercial manufacturing and deployment stage, major optical networking research groups have been focusing on standards and technologies beyond 100G. The challenge of generating 400 Gb/s and 1 Tb/s per channel and transmitting at these speeds is one of the hottest topics in recent conferences on optical communications. Many forward-looking solutions have been proposed, and experiments have been carried out to achieve these high bit rates.

Globally, many research groups have been developing novel enabling technologies for meeting the requirements of high capacity and high bit rate operation using spectrally efficient multiplexing and modulation formats. These advanced techniques include single-carrier polarization multiplexing QPSK (which is currently used in 100G commercial products), multicarrier optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, multicore or multimode spatial multiplexing, and coherent detection based on digital signal processing. For high-speed optical signal transmission, a traditional transponder with direct modulation and detection has a simple, low-cost architecture. However, the transmission distance at high bit rate is limited by the rigid requirements of high optical signal-to-noise ratio, polarization mode dispersion, and optical/electrical filtering effects. Coherent detection based on digital signal processing is becoming the trend for optical signal receivers because it can lift these limitations. The change from direct detection to coherent detection is revolutionary. Receiver architecture, transmission fiber and distance, and network management will be completely reshaped from previous direct-detection systems.

This special issue includes comprehensive reviews and original technical contributions that cover the rapid advances and broad scope of technologies in optical fiber communications. The invited papers of Part I of this issue come from service providers, telecommunication equipment manufacturers, and top universities and research institutes. After peer review, eleven papers were selected for this special issue. We hope it serves as a timely and high-quality networking forum for scientists and engineers.

The first two papers come from service providers. In the first paper,“High Spectral Efficiency 400G Transmission,”Dr. Xiang Zhou from AT&T labs gives an overview of the generation and transmission of 450 Gb/s wavelength-division multiplexed channels over the standard 50 GHz ITU-T grid at a net spectral efficiency of 8.4 b/s/Hz. In the second paper, “Direct-Detection Optical OFDM Superchannel for Transmitting at Greater Than 200 Gb/s,”Dr. Peng Wei Ren et al. from KDD&I propose and experimentally demonstrate a direct-detection optical orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) superchannel and optical multiband receiving method to support a data rate higher than 200 Gb/s and to support longer distance for direct-detection systems.

Papers 3-9 come from universities that are renowned for research on optical transmission. In the third paper,“Spatial Mode Division Multiplexing for High-Speed Optical Coherent Detection Systems,”Professor William Shieh from the University of Melbourne proposes using spatial mode division multiplexing to increase transmission capacity. In the fourth paper,“Exploiting the Faster-Than-Nyquist Concept in Wavelength-Division Multiplexing Systems by Duobinary Shaping,”Dr. Jianqiang Li from Chalmers University of Technology presents a novel algorithm at the coherent receiver that is based on digital signal processing and is designed to tolerate strong filtering effects. In the fifth paper, “Super Receiver Design for Superchannel-Coherent Optical Systems,”Dr. Cheng Liu from Georgia Institute of Technology presents a novel super-receiver architecture for Nyquist-WDM superchannel coherent systems. This receiver detects and demodulates multiple WDM channels simultaneously and performs better than conventional coherent receivers in Nyquist-WDM systems. In the sixth paper,“Design of Silicon-Based High-Speed Plasmonic Modulator,”Professor Yikai Su from Shanghai Jiao Tong University proposes a silicon-based high-speed plasmonic modulator. This modulator is based on a double-layer structure with a 16 um long metal-dielectric-metal plasmonic waveguide at the upper layer and two silicon single-mode waveguides at the bottom layer. In the seventh paper,“Key Technology in Optical OFDM-PON,”Professor Xiangjun Xin from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications proposes a novel optical access network based on OFDM. In the eighth paper,“Compensation of Nonlinear Effects in Coherent Detection Optical Transmission Systems,”Professor Fan Zhang from Beijing University reviews two kinds of nonlinear compensation methods: digital backward propagation, and nonlinear electrical equalizer based on the time-domain Volterra series. The last paper comes from a telecommunication equipment manufacturer. In“Performance Assessment of 1 Tb/s Nyquist-WDMPM-RZ-QPSK Superchannel Transmission over 1000 km SMF-28 with MAP Equalization,”Dr. Ze Dong from ZTE (USA) evaluates the transmission performance of a 1 Tb/s (10 × 112 Gb/s) Nyquist-WDM PM-RZ-QPSK superchannel over a widely deployed SMF-28 fiber with and without MAP equalization.

We thank all authors for their valuable contributions and all reviewers for their timely and constructive feedback on submitted papers. We hope the contents of this issue are informative and useful for all readers.

Key words: optical communications, 100G, Ultrahigh-Speed Communications

摘要： Fiber optics underpins the communication infrastructure of today’s information society. Rapid progress in advanced modulation formats, high-gain coding, optical amplification, coherent detection with digital signal processing, and new types of transmission fibers have significantly affected optical communications. Increasing transmission capacity and bit rate per channel is the trend for optical transmission systems and networks. Commercial transmission capacity has increased more than one hundred thousand times since the first optical transmission system was deployed in the 1980s. Spectral efficiency of a single channel has increased from 0.025 b/s/Hz to 2 b/s/Hz. Bit rate per channel for commercial products has increased from 155 Mb/s to more than 100 Gb/s. Larger capacity is driven by the proliferation of broadband FTTH access networks, broadband wireless communications, and high-speed data communication systems in data centers and high performance computing. High bit rate per channel simplifies the management of complex optical networks. Although 100G is just the beginning of the commercial manufacturing and deployment stage, major optical networking research groups have been focusing on standards and technologies beyond 100G. The challenge of generating 400 Gb/s and 1 Tb/s per channel and transmitting at these speeds is one of the hottest topics in recent conferences on optical communications. Many forward-looking solutions have been proposed, and experiments have been carried out to achieve these high bit rates.

Globally, many research groups have been developing novel enabling technologies for meeting the requirements of high capacity and high bit rate operation using spectrally efficient multiplexing and modulation formats. These advanced techniques include single-carrier polarization multiplexing QPSK (which is currently used in 100G commercial products), multicarrier optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, multicore or multimode spatial multiplexing, and coherent detection based on digital signal processing. For high-speed optical signal transmission, a traditional transponder with direct modulation and detection has a simple, low-cost architecture. However, the transmission distance at high bit rate is limited by the rigid requirements of high optical signal-to-noise ratio, polarization mode dispersion, and optical/electrical filtering effects. Coherent detection based on digital signal processing is becoming the trend for optical signal receivers because it can lift these limitations. The change from direct detection to coherent detection is revolutionary. Receiver architecture, transmission fiber and distance, and network management will be completely reshaped from previous direct-detection systems.

This special issue includes comprehensive reviews and original technical contributions that cover the rapid advances and broad scope of technologies in optical fiber communications. The invited papers of Part I of this issue come from service providers, telecommunication equipment manufacturers, and top universities and research institutes. After peer review, eleven papers were selected for this special issue. We hope it serves as a timely and high-quality networking forum for scientists and engineers.

The first two papers come from service providers. In the first paper,“High Spectral Efficiency 400G Transmission,”Dr. Xiang Zhou from AT&T labs gives an overview of the generation and transmission of 450 Gb/s wavelength-division multiplexed channels over the standard 50 GHz ITU-T grid at a net spectral efficiency of 8.4 b/s/Hz. In the second paper, “Direct-Detection Optical OFDM Superchannel for Transmitting at Greater Than 200 Gb/s,”Dr. Peng Wei Ren et al. from KDD&I propose and experimentally demonstrate a direct-detection optical orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) superchannel and optical multiband receiving method to support a data rate higher than 200 Gb/s and to support longer distance for direct-detection systems.

Papers 3-9 come from universities that are renowned for research on optical transmission. In the third paper,“Spatial Mode Division Multiplexing for High-Speed Optical Coherent Detection Systems,”Professor William Shieh from the University of Melbourne proposes using spatial mode division multiplexing to increase transmission capacity. In the fourth paper,“Exploiting the Faster-Than-Nyquist Concept in Wavelength-Division Multiplexing Systems by Duobinary Shaping,”Dr. Jianqiang Li from Chalmers University of Technology presents a novel algorithm at the coherent receiver that is based on digital signal processing and is designed to tolerate strong filtering effects. In the fifth paper, “Super Receiver Design for Superchannel-Coherent Optical Systems,”Dr. Cheng Liu from Georgia Institute of Technology presents a novel super-receiver architecture for Nyquist-WDM superchannel coherent systems. This receiver detects and demodulates multiple WDM channels simultaneously and performs better than conventional coherent receivers in Nyquist-WDM systems. In the sixth paper,“Design of Silicon-Based High-Speed Plasmonic Modulator,”Professor Yikai Su from Shanghai Jiao Tong University proposes a silicon-based high-speed plasmonic modulator. This modulator is based on a double-layer structure with a 16 um long metal-dielectric-metal plasmonic waveguide at the upper layer and two silicon single-mode waveguides at the bottom layer. In the seventh paper,“Key Technology in Optical OFDM-PON,”Professor Xiangjun Xin from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications proposes a novel optical access network based on OFDM. In the eighth paper,“Compensation of Nonlinear Effects in Coherent Detection Optical Transmission Systems,”Professor Fan Zhang from Beijing University reviews two kinds of nonlinear compensation methods: digital backward propagation, and nonlinear electrical equalizer based on the time-domain Volterra series. The last paper comes from a telecommunication equipment manufacturer. In“Performance Assessment of 1 Tb/s Nyquist-WDMPM-RZ-QPSK Superchannel Transmission over 1000 km SMF-28 with MAP Equalization,”Dr. Ze Dong from ZTE (USA) evaluates the transmission performance of a 1 Tb/s (10 × 112 Gb/s) Nyquist-WDM PM-RZ-QPSK superchannel over a widely deployed SMF-28 fiber with and without MAP equalization.

We thank all authors for their valuable contributions and all reviewers for their timely and constructive feedback on submitted papers. We hope the contents of this issue are informative and useful for all readers.

关键词: optical communications, 100G, Ultrahigh-Speed Communications