This paper summarizes recent reports on the internet's energy consumption and the internet's benefits on climate actions. It discusses energy-efficiency and the need for a common standard for evaluating the climate impact of future communication technologies and suggests a model that can be adapted to different internet applications such as streaming, online reading and downloading. The two main approaches today are based on how much data is transmitted or how much time the data is under way. The paper concludes that there is a need for a standardized method to estimate energy consumption and CO2 emission related to internet services. This standard should include a method for energy-optimizing future networks, where every Wh will be scrutinized.

Multi-band WDM transmission beyond the C+L-band is a promising technology for achieving larger capacity transmission by a limited number of installed fibers. In addition to the C- and L-band, we can expect to use the S-band as the next band. Although the development of optical components for new bands, particularly transceivers, entails resource dispersion, which is one of the barriers to the realization of multi-band systems, wavelength conversion by transparent all-optical signal processing enables new wavelength bandtransmission using existing components. Therefore, we proposed a transmission system including a new wavelength band such as the S-band and made it possible to use a transceiver for the existing band by performing the whole-band wavelength conversion without using a transceiver for the new band. As a preliminary verification to demonstrate multi-band WDM transmission including S-band, we investigated the application of a novel wavelength converter between C-band and S-band, which consists of periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide, to the proposed system. We first characterized the conversion efficiency and noise figure of the wavelength converter and estimated the transmission performance of the system through the wavelength converter. Using the evaluated wavelength converters and test signals of 64 channels arranged in the C-band at 75-GHz intervals, we constructed an experimental setup for S-band transmission through an 80-km standard single-mode fiber. We then demonstrated error-free transmission of real-time 400-Gb/s DP-16QAM signals after forward error correction decoding. From the experimental results, it was clarified that the wavelength converter which realizes the uniform lossless conversion covering the whole C-band effectively achieves the S-band WDM transmission, and it was verified that the capacity improvement of the multi-band WDM system including the S-band can be expected by applying it in combination with the C+L-band WDM system.

This paper presents a compact fully-differential distributed amplifier using a coupled inductor. Differential distributed amplifiers are widely required in optical communication systems. Most of the distributed amplifiers reported in the past are single-ended or pseudo-differential topologies. In addition, the differential distributed amplifiers require many inductors, which increases the silicon cost. In this study, we use differentially coupled inductors to reduce the chip area to less than half and eliminate the difficulties in layout design. The challenge in using coupled inductors is the capacitive parasitic coupling that degrades the flatness of frequency response. To address this challenge, the odd-mode image parameters of a differential artificial transmission line are derived using a simple loss-less model. Based on the analytical results, we optimize the dimensions of the inductor with the gradient descent algorithm to achieve accurate impedance matching and phase matching. The amplifier was fabricated in 0.18-µm CMOS technology. The core area of the amplifier is 0.27 mm2, which is 57% smaller than the previous work. Besides, we demonstrated a small group delay variation of ±2.7 ps thanks to the optimization. the amplifier successfully performed 30-Gbps NRZ and PAM4 transmissions with superior jitter performance. The proposed technique will promote the high-density integration of differential traveling wave devices.

One of cost-effective ways to increase the transmission capacity of current standard wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission systems is to use a wavelength band other than the C-band to transmit in multi-band. We proposed the concept of multi-band system using wavelength conversion, which can simultaneously process signals over a wide wavelength range. All-optical wavelength conversion could be used to convert C-band WDM signals into other bands in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) by four-wave mixing and allow to simultaneously transmit multiple WDM signals including other than the C-band, with only C-band transceivers. Wavelength conversion has been reported for various nonlinear waveguide materials other than HNLF. In such nonlinear materials, we noticed the possibility of wideband transmission by dispersion-tailored silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides. Based on the CMOS process has high accuracy, it is expected that the chromatic dispersion fluctuation could be reduced in mass production. As a first step in the investigation of the broadness of wavelength conversion using SOI-based waveguides, we designed and fabricated dispersion-tailored 12 strip waveguides provided with an edge coupler at both ends. Each of the 12 waveguides having different widths and lengths and is connected to fibers via lensed fibers or by lenses. In order to characterize each waveguide, the pump-probe experimental setup was constructed using a tunable light source as pump and an unmodulated 96-ch C-band WDM test signal. Using this setup, we evaluate insertion loss, input power dependence, conversion bandwidth and conversion efficiency. We confirmed C-band test signal was converted to the S-band and the L-band using the same silicon waveguide with 3dB conversion bandwidth over 100-nm. Furthermore, an increased design tolerance of at least 90nm was confirmed for C-to-S conversion by shortening the waveguide length. It is confirmed that the wavelength converters using the nonlinear waveguide has sufficiently wide conversion bandwidth to enhance the multi-band WDM transmission system.

We demonstrated 1-Tb/s-class transmissions of field-deployed large-core low-loss fiber links, which is compliant with ITU-T G.654.E, using our newly developed real-time transponder consisting of a state-of-the-art 16-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) based digital signal processing application-specific integrated circuit (DSP-ASIC) and an indium phosphide (InP) based high-bandwidth coherent driver modulator (HB-CDM). In this field experiment, we have achieved record transmission distances of 1122km for net data-rate 1-Tb/s transmission with dual polarization-division multiplexed (PDM) 32 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals, and of 336.6 km for net data-rate 1.2-Tb/s transmission with dual PDM-64QAM signals. This is the first demonstration of applying hybrid erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and backward-distributed Raman amplifier were applied to terrestrial G.654.E fiber links. We also confirmed the stability of signal performance over field fiber transmission in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) condition. The Q-factor fluctuations respectively were only less than or equal to 0.052dB and 0.07dB for PDM-32QAM and PDM-64QAM signals within continuous measurements for 60 minutes.

The needs for ultra-high speed short- to medium-reach optical fiber links beyond 100-Gbit/s is becoming larger and larger especially for intra and inter-data center applications. In recent intensity-modulated/direct-detection (IM/DD) high-speed optical transceivers with the channel bit rate of 50 and/or 100 Gbit/s, multilevel pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) is finally adopted to lower the signaling speed. To further increase the transmission capacity for the next-generation optical transceivers, various signaling techniques have been studied, especially thanks to advanced digital signal processing (DSP). In this paper, we review various signaling technologies proposed so far for short-to-medium reach applications.

A number of all-optical signal processing schemes based on nonlinear optical effects have been proposed and demonstrated for use in future photonic networks. Since various modulation formats have been developed for optical communication systems, all-optical converters between different modulation formats will be a key technology to connect networks transparently and efficiently. This paper reviews our recent works on all-optical modulation format conversion technologies in order to highlight the fundamental principles and applications in variety of all-optical signal processing schemes.

This paper investigates approaches that can cancel nonlinear phase noise effectively for the phase-conjugate pair diversity transmission of 16-QAM WDM signals through multi-core fiber. The geometric mean is introduced for the combination of the phase-conjugate pair. A numerical simulation suggests that span-by-span chromatic dispersion compensation is more effective at cancelling phase noise in long distance transmission than lumped compensation at the receiver. Simulations suggest the span-wise compensation described herein yields Q-value enhancement of 7.8 and 6.8dB for CD values of 10 and 20.6ps/nm/km, respectively, whereas the lumped compensation equivalent attains only 3.5dB. A 1050km recirculating loop experiment confirmed a Q-value enhancement of 4.1dB for 20.6ps/nm/km, span-wise compensation transmission.

The remaining issues in optical transmission technology are the degradation of optical signal to noise power ratio due to amplifier noise and the distortions due to optical nonlinear effects in a fiber. Therefore in addition to the Shannon limit, practical channel capacity is believed to be restricted by the nonlinear Shannon limit. The nonlinear Shannon limit has been derived under the assumption that the received signal points on the constellation map deviated by optical amplifier noise and nonlinear interference noise are symmetrically distributed around the ideal signal point and the sum of the noises are regarded as white Gaussian noise. The nonlinear Shannon limit is considered as a kind of theoretical limitation. However it is doubtful that its derivation process and applicable range have been understood well. In this paper, some fundamental papers on the nonlinear Shannon limit are reviewed to better understanding its meaning and applicable range.

This paper describes a blind frequency offset estimator (FOE) with wide frequency range for coherent quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) receivers. The FOE combines a spectrum-based frequency offset estimation algorithm as a coarse estimator with a frequency offset estimation algorithm using the periodogram as a fine estimator. To establish our design methodology, each block of the FOE is rigorously analyzed by using formulas and the minimum fast Fourier transform (FFT) size that generates a frequency spectrum for both the coarse and fine estimators is determined. The coarse estimator's main feature is that all estimation processes are carried out in the frequency domain, which yields convergence more than five times faster than that of conventional estimators. The estimation frequency range of the entire FOE is more than 1.8 times wider than that of conventional FOEs. Experiments on coherent optical 64-ary QAM (64-QAM) reveal that frequency offset estimation can be achieved under a frequency offset value greater than the highest value of the conventional estimation range.

High gain extinction ratio and stable control of the phase in phase sensitive amplification are fundamental to realize either phase regeneration or quadrature squeezing of phase modulated signals in an efficient and robust manner. In this paper, we show that a combination of our previously demonstrated “sideband-assisted” dual-pump phase sensitive amplifier with a gain extinction ratio of more than 25dB, and a phase-locked loop based stabilization technique, enable efficient QPSK quadrature squeezing. Its stable operation is exploited to realize phase de-multiplexing of QPSK signals into BPSK tributaries. The phase de-multiplexed signals are evaluated through measurement of constellation diagrams, eye diagrams and more importantly, BER curves. The de-multiplexed BPSK signals exhibited an OSNR penalty of less than 1dB compared to the back-to-back BPSK signals.

We propose an interference avoidance architecture using uneven spreading as a media access mechanism for optical code division multiple access (OCDMA). While an equal-intensity pulse sequence encoded with the spreading sequence assigned to each node is transmitted for a “1” bit in conventional OCDMA with on-off keying (OOK), the proposed architecture creates an uneven-intensity pulse sequence where one of the pulses has higher intensity than the others. The high-intensity pulse allows source nodes to use increased sensing threshold for channel sensing, which leads to an increase in the number of chip offsets available for collision-free transmission. Our receiver with a hard limiter (HL) allows destination nodes to receive the transmission without false positives. Interference avoidance performance is examined by deriving the collision probability and comparing it with the conventional interference avoidance with equal-intensity spreading. Our numerical results show that our architecture has lower collision probability, shorter time required for channel sensing, higher throughput, higher bit rate, and supports more nodes than the conventional one for a fixed collision probability.

We review our recent work on ultra-long-haul wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) transmission with high spectral efficiency (SE) employing tight pre-filtering and multi-symbol detection. We start the discussion with a theoretical evaluation of the SE limit of pre-filtered modulation in optical fiber communication systems. We show that pre-filtering induced symbol correlation generates a modulation with memory and thus, a higher SE limit than that of the original memory-less modulation. We also investigate the merits of utilizing the pre-filtering induced symbol correlation with multi-symbol detection to achieve high SE transmission. We demonstrate transoceanic WDM transmission of a pre-filtered polarization division multiplexed return-to-zero quaternary phased shift keying (PDM-RZ-QPSK) modulation format with multi-symbol detection, achieving 419% SE which is higher than the SE limit of the original memory-less PDM-RZ-QPSK format.

Various types of optical connector with a precise alignment mechanism and long-term reliability have been researched, developed and improved during about 30 years since practical optical communication systems were first introduced in Japan in 1981. The main issues related to optical fiber connector development changed from performance improvement to miniaturization, cost reduction and ease of field assembly when optical communication systems expanded from optical trunk networks to optical access networks. Various different key technologies for optical connectors have been developed to meet these requirements, and a large number of optical connectors are currently being used for the flexible and efficient construction, maintenance and operation of optical access networks. This paper describes the structure, features, and basic technologies of the optical connectors employed in optical access networks in Japan and their standardization and future prospects.

This paper analyzes transient behaviors of the polarization-mode-dispersion (PMD) vector for the Foschini and Poole's birefringence vector model. We find an asymptotic solution of the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation representing the solution as a superposition of angular components characterized by the Legendre polynomials. The distribution tail for the PMD vector magnitude evolves slowly to the Maxwellian owing to the residual couplings between adjacent angular components. Of particular interest, the distribution tail for the PMD vector magnitude lies well below the Maxwellian fit during the transient.

Adaptive polarization mode dispersion (PMD) compensation is required for the speed-up and advancement of the present optical communications. The combination of a tunable PMD compensator and its adaptive control method achieves adaptive PMD compensation. In this paper, we report an effective search control algorithm for the feedback control of the PMD compensator. The algorithm is based on the hill-climbing method. However, the step size changes randomly to prevent the convergence from being trapped at a local maximum or a flat, unlike the conventional hill-climbing method. The randomness depends on the Gaussian probability density functions. We conducted transmission simulations at 160 Gb/s and the results show that the proposed method provides more optimal compensator control than the conventional hill-climbing method.

We propose and demonstrate a scheme enhancing the performance of optical access networks with Manchester coded downstream and re-modulated NRZ coded upstream. It is achieved by threshold level control of a limiting amplifier at a receiver, and the minimum sensitivity of upstream is significantly improved for the re-modulation scheme with 5 Gb/s Manchester coded downstream and 2.488 Gb/s NRZ upstream data rates.

An all-optical phase multiplexing scheme for phase-modulated signals is proposed and experimentally demonstrated using four-wave mixing (FWM) in a highly-nonlinear fiber (HNLF). Two 10-Gb/s π/2-shifted differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) signals are experimentally demonstrated to be converted and phase-multiplexed into a 20-Gb/s differential quadrature phase-shift keying (DQPSK) signal with non-return-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero (RZ) formats, respectively. Experimental results show that, due to phase-modulation-depth doubling effect and phase multiplexing effect in the FWM process, a DQPSK signal is successfully generated through the proposed all-optical phase multiplexing with improved receiver sensitivity and spectral efficiency.

Transmission performance of amplitude and phase shift keying (APSK) format is studied theoretically. The extinction ratio of the amplitude shift keying (ASK) signal of the APSK format causes a trade-off of the performance between the ASK and the phase shift keying (PSK) signal of the APSK format. Then, zero-nulling method is proposed to improve the performance of the APSK format, and its effectiveness is confirmed by the numerical simulation.

We experimentally demonstrated polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) compensation by distributing polarizers with only 1 degree of freedom (DOF) along the transmission line. The average power penalty was measured to be 0.4 dB by inserting four compensators, where average differential group delay was 47% of bit period.