Heading off the capacity crunch

Feature - Part 1: Capacity limits and remedies

Improving optical transmission capacity to keep pace with the growth in IP traffic is getting trickier. 

Engineers are being taxed in the design decisions they must make to support a growing list of speeds and data modulation schemes. There is also a fissure emerging in the equipment and components needed to address the diverging needs of long-haul and metro networks. As a result, far greater flexibility is needed, with designers looking to elastic or flexible optical networking where data rates and reach can be adapted as required.

Figure 1: The green line is the non-linear Shannon limit, above which transmission is not possible. The chart shows how more bits can be sent in a 50 GHz channel as the optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) is increased. The blue dots closest to the green line represent the performance of the WaveLogic 3, Ciena's latest DSP-ASIC family. Source: Ciena.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is only just looming. Because optical networking engineers have been so successful in squeezing information down a fibre, their scope to send additional data in future is diminishing. Simply put, it is becoming harder to put more information on the fibre as the Shannon limit, as defined by information theory, is approached.

"Our [lab] experiments are within a factor of two of the non-linear Shannon limit, while our products are within a factor of three to six of the Shannon limit," says Peter Winzer, head of the optical transmission systems and networks research department at Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent. The non-linear Shannon limit dictates how much information can be sent across a wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) channel as a function of the optical signal-to-noise ratio.

A factor of two may sound a lot, says Winzer, but it is not. "To exhaust that last factor of two, a lot of imperfections need to be compensated and the ASIC needs to become a lot more complex," he says. The ASIC is the digital signal processor (DSP), used for pulse shaping at the transmitter and coherent detection at the receiver.     

Our [lab] experiments are within a factor of two of the non-linear Shannon limit, while our products are within a factor of three to six of the Shannon limit - Peter Winzer 

At the recent OFC 2015 conference and exhibition, there was plenty of announcements pointing to industry progress. Several companies announced 100 Gigabit coherent optics in the pluggable, compact CFP2 form factor, while Acacia detailed a flexible-rate 5x7 inch MSA capable of 200, 300 and 400 Gigabit rates. And research results were reported on the topics of elastic optical networking and spatial division multiplexing, work designed to ensure that networking capacity continues to scale.  

Trade-offs

There are several performance issues that engineers must consider when designing optical transmission systems. Clearly, for submarine systems, maximising reach and the traffic carried by a fibre are key. For metro, more data can be carried on a single carrier to improving overall capacity but at the expense of reach.

Such varied requirements are met using several design levers:  

•  Baud or symbol rate 
•  The modulation scheme which determines the number of bits carried by each symbol 
•  Multiple carriers, if needed, to carry the overall service as a super-channel

The baud rate used is dictated by the performance limits of the electronics. Today that is 32 Gbaud: 25 Gbaud for the data payload and up to 7 Gbaud for forward error correction and other overhead bits. 

Doubling the symbol rate from 32 Gbaud used for 100 Gigabit coherent to 64 Gbaud is a significant challenge for the component makers. The speed hike requires a performance overhaul of the electronics and the optics: the analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converters and the drivers through to the modulators and photo-detectors. 

"Increasing the baud rate gives more interface speed for the transponder," says Winzer. But the overall fibre capacity stays the same, as the signal spectrum doubles with a doubling in symbol rate.

However, increasing the symbol rate brings cost and size benefits. "You get more bits through, and so you are sharing the cost of the electronics across more bits," says Kim Roberts, senior manager, optical signal processing at Ciena. It also implies a denser platform by doubling the speed per line card slot.  

As you try to encode more bits in a constellation, so your noise tolerance goes down - Kim Roberts   

Modulation schemes 

The modulation used determines the number of bits encoded on each symbol. Optical networking equipment already use binary phase-shift keying (BPSK or 2-quadrature amplitude modulation, 2-QAM) for the most demanding, longest-reach submarine spans; the workhorse quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK or 4-QAM) for 100 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) transmission, and the 200 Gbps 16-QAM for distances up to 1,000 km.

Moving to a higher QAM scheme increases WDM capacity but at the expense of reach. That is because as more bits are encoded on a symbol, the separation between them is smaller. "As you try to encode more bits in a constellation, so your noise tolerance goes down," says Roberts.   

One recent development among system vendors has been to add more modulation schemes to enrich the transmission options available. 

From QPSK to 16-QAM, you get a factor of two increase in capacity but your reach decreases of the order of 80 percent - Steve Grubb

Besides BPSK, QPSK and 16-QAM, vendors are adding 8-QAM, an intermediate scheme between QPSK and 16-QAM. These include Acacia with its AC-400 MSA, Coriant, and Infinera. Infinera has tested 8-QAM as well as 3-QAM, a scheme between BPSK and QPSK, as part of submarine trials with Telstra. 

"From QPSK to 16-QAM, you get a factor of two increase in capacity but your reach decreases of the order of 80 percent," says Steve Grubb, an Infinera Fellow. Using 8-QAM boosts capacity by half compared to QPSK, while delivering more signal margin than 16-QAM. Having the option to use the intermediate formats of 3-QAM and 8-QAM enriches the capacity tradeoff options available between two fixed end-points, says Grubb.    

Ciena has added two chips to its WaveLogic 3 DSP-ASIC family of devices: the WaveLogic 3 Extreme and the WaveLogic 3 Nano for metro. 

WaveLogic3 Extreme uses a proprietary modulation format that Ciena calls 8D-2QAM, a tweak on BPSK that uses longer duration signalling that enhances span distances by up to 20 percent. The 8D-2QAM is aimed at legacy dispersion-compensated fibre that carry 10 Gbps wavelengths and offers up to 40 percent additional upgrade capacity compared to BPSK. 

Ciena has also added 4-amplitude-shift-keying (4-ASK) modulation alongside QPSK to its WaveLogic3 Nano chip. The 4-ASK scheme is also designed for use alongside 10 Gbps wavelengths that introduce phase noise, to which 4-ASK has greater tolerance than QPSK. Ciena's 4-ASK design also generates less heat and is less costly than BPSK.    

According to Roberts, a designer’s goal is to use the fastest symbol rate possible, and then add the richest constellation as possible "to carry as many bits as you can, given the noise and distance you can go". 

After that, the remaining issue is whether a carrier’s service can be fitted on one carrier or whether several carriers are needed, forming a super-channel. Packing a super-channel's carriers tightly benefits overall fibre spectrum usage and reduces the spectrum wasted for guard bands needed when a signal is optically switched.  

Can symbol rate be doubled to 64 Gbaud? "It looks impossibly hard but people are going to solve that," says Roberts. It is also possible to use a hybrid approach where symbol rate and modulation schemes are used. The table shows how different baud rate/ modulation schemes can be used to achieve a 400 Gigabit single-carrier signal.

Note how using polarisation for coherent transmission doubles the overall data rate. Source: Gazettabyte

But industry views differ as to how much scope there is to improve overall capacity of a fibre and the optical performance.

Roberts stresses that his job is to develop commercial systems rather than conduct lab 'hero' experiments. Such systems need to be work in networks for 15 years and must be cost competitive. "It is not over yet," says Roberts.

He says we are still some way off from when all that remains are minor design tweaks only. "I don't have fun changing the colour of the paint or reducing the cost of the washers by 10 cents,” he says. “And I am having a lot of fun with the next-generation design [being developed by Ciena].”  

"We are nearing the point of diminishing returns in terms of spectrum efficiency, and the same is true with DSP-ASIC development," says Winzer. Work will continue to develop higher speeds per wavelength, to increase capacity per fibre, and to achieve higher densities and lower costs. In parallel, work continues in software and networking architectures. For example, flexible multi-rate transponders used for elastic optical networking, and software-defined networking that will be able to adapt the optical layer.

After that, designers are looking at using more amplification bands, such as the L-band and S-band alongside the current C-band to increase fibre capacity. But it will be a challenge to match the optical performance of the C-band across all bands used. 

"I would believe in a doubling or maybe a tripling of bandwidth but absolutely not more than that," says Winzer. "This is a stop-gap solution that allows me to get to the next level without running into desperation." 

The designers' 'next level' is spatial division multiplexing. Here, signals are launched down multiple channels, such as multiple fibres, multi-mode fibre and multi-core fibre. "That is what people will have to do on a five-year to 10-year horizon," concludes Winzer. 

For Part 2, click here

See also:

• Scaling Optical Fiber Networks: Challenges and Solutions by Peter Winzer  

• High Capacity Transport - 100G and Beyond, Journal of Lightwave Technology, Vol 33, No. 3, February 2015.

A version of this article first appeared in an OFC 2015 show preview