DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engg.

Subject: Optical Communication and Networks Sem VII
Solution of Internal Assesment II Year (2015-16)

1]

Comparison of SLED and

ELED
SLED
1)Easy to fabricate.
2)Easy to mount and handle
3)Require less critical tolerance.
4)Less reliable
5)Low system performance.
6)Less modulation bandwidth.
7)Couple less optical power into low
NA fiber.
8)Light is emitted from the surface of
active layer.
9)Wider spectral width.
10)Maximum quantum efficiency is
upto 60%.
11)Exclusively used in multimode
fibers.
12)A fiber is cemented into the
substrate so as to improve the
coupling efficiency
ELED
1)Difficult to fabricate.
2) Difficult to mount and handle.
3) Need critical tolerance on fabrication.
4)Highly reliable.
5)High system performance.
6) Better modulation bandwidth of the
order of hundred of MHz.
7)Couple more optical power into low NA
fiber.
8)Light is emitted from edge of active
layer.
9)Narrow spectral width.
10)Internal quantum efficiency is in range
of 60% to 80%.
11) It may be used for single mode or
multimode.
12)No fiber cementing is required.

2]

Absorption: An atom in the ground state might absorb a photon emitted by another atom,
thus making a transition to an excited state.
Spontaneous Emission: Random emission of a photon, which enables the atom to relax to the
ground state.
 DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

Stimulated Emission: An atom in an excited state might be stimulated to emit a photon by

another incident photon.

3]
Gratings- The term grating is used to describe almost any device whose operation involves
interference among multiple optical signals originating from the same source but with different
relative phase shifts . An exception is a device where the multiple optical signals are generated by
repeated traversals of a single cavity; such devices are called etalons . An electromagnetic wave
(light) of angular frequency ω propagating, say, in the z direction has a dependence on z and t of
the form cos(ωt − βz) . Here, β is the propagation constant and depends on the medium. The phase
of the wave is ωt −βz . Thus a relative phase shift between two waves from the same source can
beachieved if they traverse two paths of different lengths.

Two examples of gratings are shown in Figure 9(a) and (b). Gratings have been widely used for
centuries in optics to separate light into its constituent wavelengths. In WDM communication
systems, gratings are used as demultiplexers to separate the individual wavelengths or as
multiplexers to combine them.
 DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

4]

5]
 DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

6] Couplers and most other passive optical devices are reciprocal devices in that the devices work
exactly the same way if their inputs and outputs are reversed. However, in many systems there is a
need for a passive nonreciprocal device. An isolator is an example of such a device. Its main
function is to allow transmission in one direction through it but block all transmission in the other
direction. Isolators are used in systems at the output of optical amplifiers and lasers primarily to
prevent reflections from entering these devices, which would otherwise degrade their performance.

The two key parameters of an isolator are its insertion loss , which is the loss in the forward
direction and which should be as small as possible, and its isolation , which is the loss in the reverse
direction and which should be as large as possible. The typical insertion loss is around 1 dB, and the
isolation is around 40–50 dB.
In order to understand the operation of an isolator, we need to understand the notion of polarization.
The state of polarization (SOP) of light propagating in a single-mode fiber refers to the orientation
of its electric field vector on a plane that is orthogonal to its direction of propagation. At any time,
the electric field vector can be expressed as a linear combination of the two orthogonal linear
polarizations supported by the fiber. We call these two polarization modes the horizontal and
vertical modes.

Assume that the input light signal has the vertical SOP shown in the figure. It is passed through a
polarizer , which passes only light energy in the vertical SOP and blocks light energy in the
horizontal SOP. Such polarizers can be realized using crystals, called dichroics, which have the
property of selectively absorbing light with one SOP. The polarizer is followed by a Faraday
rotator .
A Faraday rotator is a nonreciprocal device, made of a crystal that rotates the SOP, say, clockwise,
by 45◦ , regardless of the direction of propagation. The Faraday rotator is followed by another
polarizer that passes only SOPs with this 45◦ orientation. Thus the light signal from left to right is
passed through the device without any loss.
On the other hand, light entering the device from the right due to a reflection, with the same 45◦
SOP orientation, is rotated another 45◦ by the Faraday rotator, and thus blocked by the first
polarizer.
 DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

2.a]

2.b] refer notes

3.a Benefits of SONET/SDH and contrast it with PDH.

1. Multiplexing simplification: In asynchronous multiplexing, each terminal in the network runs

its own clock, and while we can specify a nominal clock rate for the signal, there can be significant
differences in the actual rates between different clocks. For example, in a DS3 signal, a 20 ppm
(parts per million) variation in clock rate between different clocks, which is not uncommon, can
produce a difference in bit rate of 1.8 kb/s between two signals. So when lower-speed streams are
multiplexed by interleaving their bits, extra bits may need to be stuffed in the multiplexed stream to
account for differences between the clock rates of the individual streams. As a result, the bit rates in
the asynchronous hierarchy are not integral multiples of the basic 64 kb/s rate, but rather slightly
higher to account for this bit stuffing. For instance, a DS1 signal is designed to carry 24 64 kb/s
signals, but its bit rate (1.544 Mb/s) is slightly higher than 24 X 64 kb/s.
 DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

With asynchronous multiplexing, it is very difficult to pick out a low-bitrate stream, say, at 64 kb/s,
from a higher-speed stream passing through, say, a DS3 stream, without completely demultiplexing
the higher-speed stream down to its individual component streams. This results in the need for
“multiplexer mountains,” or stacked-up multiplexers, each time a low-bit-rate stream needs to be
extracted, as shown in Figure 1. This is a relatively expensive proposition and also compromises
network reliability because of the large amount of electronics needed overall.

The synchronous multiplexing structure of SONET/SDH provides significant reduction in the cost
of multiplexing and demultiplexing. All the clocks in the network are perfectly synchronized to a
single master clock, and as a consequence, the rates defined in SONET/SDH are integral multiples
of the basic rate and no bit stuffing is needed when multiplexing streams together. As a result, a
lower-speed signal can be extracted from a multiplexed SONET/SDH stream in a single step by
locating the appropriate positions of the corresponding bits in the multiplexed signal. This makes
the design of SONET multiplexers and demultiplexers much easier than their asynchronous
equivalents.

2. Management: The SONET and SDH standards incorporate extensive management information
for managing the network, including extensive performance monitoring, identification of
connectivity and traffic type, identification and reporting of failures, and a data communication
channel for transporting management information between the nodes. This is mostly lacking in the
PDH standards.

3. Interoperability: Although PDH defined multiplexing methods, it did not define a standard
format on the transmission link. Thus different vendors used different line coding, optical interfaces,
and so forth to optimize their products, which made it very difficult to connect one vendor’s
equipment to another’s via a transmission link. SONET and SDH avoid this problem by defining
standard optical interfaces that enable interoperability between equipment from different vendors on
the link.

4. Network availability: The SONET and SDH standards have evolved to incorporate specific
network topologies and specific protection techniques and associated protocols to provide high-
availability services. As a consequence, the service restoration time after a failure with SONET and
SDH is much smaller—less than 60 ms—than the restoration time in PDH networks, which
typically took several seconds to minutes.

SONET/SDH Layers
The SONET layer consists of four sublayers—the path, line, section, and physical layers. Figure 3.
shows the top three layers. Each layer, except for the physical layer, has a set of associated overhead
bytes that are used for several purposes. These overhead bytes are added whenever the layer is
 DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

introduced and removed whenever the layer is terminated in a network element.

The path layer in SONET (and SDH) is responsible for end-to-end connections between nodes and
is terminated only at the ends of a SONET connection. It is possible that intermediate nodes may do
performance monitoring of the path layer ignals, but the path overhead itself is inserted at the
source node of the connection and terminated at the destination node.

SONET Frame Structure

Figure 4. shows the structure of an STS-1 frame. A frame is 125 μs in duration (which corresponds
to a rate of 8000 frames/s), regardless of the bit rate of the SONET signal. This time is set by the 8
kHz sampling rate of a voice circuit. The frame is a specific sequence of 810 bytes, including
specific bytes allocated to carry overhead information and other bytes carrying the payload.

We can visualize this frame as consisting of 9 rows and 90 columns, with each cell holding an 8-bit
byte.

3.b] Optical Transport Network

The Optical Transport Network (OTN), sometimes referred to as G.709, was designed to transport
data packet traffic such as IP and Ethernet over fiber optics, as well as legacy traffic and in
particular SONET/SDH.
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It is called the digital wrapper technology because it wraps any client signal in overhead
information for operations, administration, and management. Its line rates, OTU1, OTU2, and
OTU3, are shown in Table . It builds on SONET/SDH concepts, and it features the following
capabilities.

1. Forward error correction (FEC): OTN has been designed for high data transmission rates, as
shown in Table 6.4. At very high data rates or over very long distances, noise is significant
andbecomes a problem when ensuring low bit error rates. Forward error correction (FEC) is critical
to achieving these low bit error rates. FEC had already been used in implementations of SDH.
These are proprietary coding schemes that rely on making use of unused section overhead bytes to
carry the redundant FEC bytes. However, the performance is limited since the number of bytes is
limited, and interoperability with other vendor equipment cannot be assured.
OTN has been designed to carry FEC overhead and employs stronger FEC using the (255,239) .
Thus, for each 255 byte block, there are 16 redundant bytes. The FEC can correct errors in a block
of up to 8 bytes of error and detect an error in a block with at most 16 bytes of error. The blocks are
interleaved to increase the length of error bursts that can be corrected.
2. Management: As we have seen in the previous section, SONET/SDH supports monitoring and
managing the signal at the section, line, and path levels. This overhead includes signal
identification, BER measurement, and communicating alarm information. OTN provides structure
for monitoring a connection endto- end and over various segments. These segments may overlap
with up to six such monitoring segments at any given point. An example application would be a
connection of a network A that passes through another network B; that is, B is serving as a carrier
for network A. Then the operators of both networks must monitor the connection as it passes
through B, using their own set of monitoring and managing signals. These signals must be operating
in tandem.
 DON BOSCO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, (DBIT), MUMBAI, 400 070

3. Protocol transparency: OTN provides a constant bit rate service. It has operations,
administration, and management of its connections that are transparent to its clients. It can
carry all types of data packet traffic including IP and 10- Gigabit Ethernet, as well as
SONET/SDH frames. OTN frames can carry entire SONET/SDH frames including overhead
without modification. OTN line rates are 7% higher than SONET/SDH line rates, and this is
due to its additional overhead and FEC information.

4. Asynchronous timing: OTN has an asynchronous mapping of client signals into OTN
frames where the clock that generates the frames can be a simple freerunning oscillator. To
account for any mismatch between the clocks of the OTN frames and the client signal, the
OTN payload floats within the frame. Using simple free-running oscillators can simplify
implementation and reduce costs. OTN also has a synchronous mapping where the clock to
generate the OTN frames is derived from the client signal.
Hierarchy
The layers of the OTN hierarchy are shown in Figure 7. The optical transmission section (OTS),
optical multiplexed section (OMS), and optical channel (OCh) layers are in the optical domain. The
OTS layer manages fiber link segments between optical components such as between optical
amplifiers, or optical amplifiers and WDM multiplexers. The OMS layer manages fiber links
between optical multiplexers and switches, and the OCh layer manages optical connections between
3R regenerators (e.g., lightpaths).

The optical channel transport unit (OTU) and optical channel data unit (ODU) have similar
functions as the section, line, path layers of SONET/SDH. The OTU is similar to the section layer
of SONET/SDH, where now the OTN OCh layer provides optical connections between 3R
regenerators. It has overhead to delineate OTN frames, provide identification of the optical
connection, monitor bit error rate (BER) performance, carry alarm indicators to signal failures, and
provide a communication channel between the end points of the optical connection. The layer adds
the FEC to the OTN frames and scrambles the frames before transmission. In addition, it provides
synchronization information for multiframes . Multiframes are a method to send messages over
multiple OTN frames. For example, a 256-byte message can be sent through a single overhead byte
over 256 frames. A multiframe has a fixed period that must be a power of two.
The optical channel data unit (ODU) has similar functions as the line and path layers of
SONET/SDH. It supports up to 6 tandem connection monitoring. Each monitoring provides
identification, monitors BER performance, carries alarm indicators, and provides communication
channels to the end points. The ODU layer has the optical channel payload unit (OPU) sublayer that
adapts client signals to the OTN frames.

Frame Structure

Figure 8 (a) shows the structure of an OTN frame. It is organized into 4 rows and 4080 columns of
bytes. A frame is transmitted serially starting with row 1, and per row from the left to right. Each
row is composed of 16 interleaved FEC blocks of 255 bytes which is a total of 16 X 255 = 4080
bytes. Each block has 1 byte of overhead, 238 bytes of payload, and 16 bytes of redundant FEC
bytes. Since 16 blocks are interleaved and each block can correct up to 8 bytes of errors, bursts of
errors can be corrected up to 16 X 8 = 128 bytes. The OTU and ODU overheads reside in columns 1
through 14 of the OTN frame, where the OTU overhead is in row 1, and the ODU overhead is in
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rows 2 through 4. The OPU overhead is in columns 15 and 16 of the frame. Figure 8(b) presents the
overhead bytes of the OTN frame. The frame is scrambled before being transmitted.