Optical Communication Theory and Techniques

Since the advent of optical communications, a great technological effort has been devoted to the exploitation of the huge bandwidth of optical fibers. Starting from a few Mb/s single channel systems, a fast and constant technological development has led to the actual 10 Gb/s per channel dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems, with dozens of channels on a single fiber. Transmitters and receivers are now ready for 40 Gb/s, whereas hundreds of channels can be simultaneously amplified by optical amplifiers. Nevertheless, despite such a pace in technological progress, optical communications are still in a primitive stage compared to radio communications: the widely spread on-off keying (OOK) modulation format is equivalent to the rough amplitude modulation (AM) format, whereas the DWDM technique is nothing more than the optical version of frequency division.