Basic Optical Communications Concepts: (Value Added Course)

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Basic Optical Communications Concepts

(Value added course)


Outline
1 Introduction

2 Components of Optical Fibre Communication

3 Transmitters

4 Receivers

5 Optical Amplifiers

6 Other Equipments

7 Conclusions

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1. Introduction:What is fibre optics?
The optical fibre is a guiding medium with a size about the diameter of
a strand of human hair which helps to transfer information from one
place to other in the form of light.
Fibre optics is the technology used to transfer information as pulses of
light through strands of fibre made up of glass or plastic over long
distances.
Optical fibre can carry huge amount of information with low losses.
Repeaters are used to strengthen the signal while transering
information over a long distance. Due to low losses in the case of
optical fibre, the distance between the repeaters are high i.e., about
250km whereas for copper cables repeater’s spacing is few kilometers.
Therefore, optical fibres are used in long-distance communications,
Local Area Networks (LANS), network which wire up telephone,
television, computers or robots.

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1. Introduction:The structure of optical fibre
Optical fibre consists of
Core : The central part through which light is
propagating. It is made up of glass or plastic.

Cladding : Central core is covered by a material with


lower refractive index so-called cladding.

Buffer coating : It is an additional protective layer for


fiber-optic strand and it is usually made up of
thermoplastic or acrylic polymer.

Jacket : Jacket is the outer covering of the optical fibre


which protect the core and cladding from damaging.

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1. Introduction:Light propagation through optical fibre
Let n1 (≈ 1.48) be the refractive index of core, n2 (≈ 1.46) be the
refractive index of cladding, and a(≈ 50μm) is the diameter of
core.
φ) at core-cladding interface > the
If the angle of incidence (
critical angle (φc = sin−1 nn2 ), then the ray will undergo total
1
internal reflection at that interface as shown in the figure.
Beacuse of the cylindrical symmetry of optical fibre, the light ray
suffers total internal reflections at lower interface too.
And the light ray guided through the core by repeated total
internal reflections.
Right figure shows that the ray can even propagate through bend
cable.
The basic principle behind light propagation in an optical
fibre is total internal refrlections

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1. Introduction:Optical fibre Communication
One of the most important application of optical fibre.
The TV signals need transfer of more information than the radio signals and therefore TV signal
carrier wave has Very/Ultra High Frequencies ≈ 30 -3000MHz.Whereas for radio broadcast
utilize lower frequencies ≈ 300kHz to 30MHz of electromagnetic spectrum.
Optical beam has frequencies 1014 − 1015 Hz. Therefore they can transfer huge amount of
information.
Optical comminication involved laser beam. Therefore data cannot be sent through open
atmosphere as data can be loss due to scattering or absorption light beam gets attenuated or
distorted.So it require a medium for data transfer.

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2. Components of Optical Fibre Communication
A point-to-point (P2P) fiber-optic network block diagram,

The major components are


Transmitter (Modulator): To Convert the electrical signals to light eg: Semiconductor laser diode
or a semiconductor light emitting diode
Transmission medium : To carry signal from source to destination eg: Optical fiber cable
Repeaters : To strengthen the signals
Receivers (Demodulator): To convert light to electrical signals eg: Photo diodes, Photo
transistors
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2. Components of Optical Fibre Communication

Point to point (P2P) communication system


From the transmitter the light beam passed through encoder and encoded optical signals
transmitted through optical fibre. At the recieving end a semiconductor photodiode recieves and
decode the optical signals back to continuous electrical signals.
For long distances communication repeaters are used to strengthen the optical signals.

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3. Transmitters
Transmitter converts electrical signals to light signals.
It consists of light source, coupling optics, and electronic equipments

Sources are of 3 types:


Wide band sources (Incandescent lamps)
Incoherent sources (Light Emitting Diode (LED))
Coherent sources (Laser Diode (LD))

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3. Transmitters
LED working principle
LED produces light while free electrons which having higher energy (in conduction band) recombine
with holes having lower energy (in the valence band) by electroluminescence.

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3. Transmitters
Laser diode working principle
Laser produces light by stimulated emmision. Let E1
and E2 be the energies of the ground and excited states
of an atom. If a photon of energy hν= E1-E2 interacts
with an atom present in the ground state, then the atom
gets excitation from ground state E1 to excited state E2.
Let, a photon of energy hν= E1-E2 interacts with the
excited atom, the atom gets de-excitation to the ground
state by emitting another photon. These photons have
the same phase and it follows coherence. This
phenomenon is called stimulated emission.

Once the transmitter convert electrical signals to light signals, then it will be directed to receiver
through optical fiber

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4. Receivers
A receiver converts an optical signal back into electrical form.
It mainly consists of photodetector.
The working principle of photodetector is photoelectric effect (Whenever light with suitable
frequency incident on a mental, electrons are emitted from the surface).
When light hit in the depletion region of PN junction, light get absorbed and transfer that energy
to electrons and current is generated.

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4. Receivers: Photodiode types
PIN diode
In between p and n-regions, another layer is added so-called intrinsic layer in order to widen the
depletion region so that there is increase in the probability that more photons get absorbed.

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4. Receivers: Photodiode types
Avalanche diode
The incident photons generate primary electrons and holes just as in PIN diode.
But a relatively high voltage is applied to the photodiode which helps in accelerating the primary
electrons and holes.
These primary electrons gain high energy and hit the neutral atoms thus produce secondary
electrons and holes.
This process will repeat and there will be lots of electrons and holes (avalanche effect).

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5. Optical Amplifiers
An optical amplifier is a device that amplifies an optical signal and thus strengthen the optical
signal.
Amplification is achieved by stimulated emission of photons from dopant ions in the doped fiber.
3 types : The working principle is stimulated emission to amplify the signal
Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA)
Doped Optical Amplifier:
Doped fiber amplifiers with rare-earth elements such as Erbium, Thulium,
Ytterbium, and Praseodymium
eg: Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier(EDFA),
Praseodymium-Doped Fiber Amplifier(PDFA)
Raman Optical Amplifier

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5. Optical Amplifiers: SOA
The basic working principle of an SOA is the same as a semiconductor laser but without
feedback.
While light pass through active medium (semiconductor), the electrons lose energy in the form of
photons and get back to the ground state. Those stimulated photons have the same wavelength
as the optical signal, thus amplifying the optical signal.

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5. Optical Amplifiers: Doped
Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier(EDFA):Working principle
High-powered beam of light is mixed with the input signal and the mixed light is guided into a section
of fiber with erbium ions included in the core.This high-powered light beam excites the erbium ions to
their higher-energy state. When the photons belonging to the signal at a different wavelength from the
pump light meet the excited erbium ions, the erbium ions give up some of their energy to the signal
and return to their lower-energy state.

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5. Optical Amplifiers: Doped
Praseodymium-Doped Fiber Amplifier(PDFA):Working principle
High-powered beam of light is mixed with the input signal and the mixed light is guided into a section
of fiber with Praseodymium ions included in the core.This high-powered light beam excites the erbium
ions to their higher-energy state. When the photons belonging to the signal at a different wavelength
from the pump light meet the excited erbium ions, the erbium ions give up some of their energy to the
signal and return to their lower-energy state.

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6. Other Equipments
Add-Drop Multiplexer (ADM):
A multiplexer combines several lower-bandwidth streams of data into a single beam of light. An
add-drop multiplexer also has the capability to add one or more lower-bandwidth signals to an
existing high-bandwidth data stream, and at the same time can extract or drop other
low-bandwidth signals, removing them from the stream and redirecting them to some other
network path.

OADM (Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer)


OADM is used for selectively dropping and inserting optical signals.

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6. Other Equipments
Digital Cross Connect:
It is a device used to grouping smaller telecommunications signals into larger
Resilient Packet Ring (RPR):
It is designed for the transport of data traffic over optical fiber ring networks. RPR works on a
concept of dual counter rotating rings called ringlets. These ringlets are set up by creating RPR
stations at nodes where traffic is supposed to drop, per flow

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7. Conclusions

We have seen the various components of optical fiber communication


It mainly consists of Transmitter, Medium, and Receiver
We have also discussed the role of other equipments used in the optical fiber communication

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References

[1] A book "Fiber-Optic Communication Technology" by Djafar K Mynbaev and Lowell L. Scheiner.
[2] Shen, M., Furniss, D., Tang, Z., Barny, E., Sojka, L., Sujecki, S.,Seddon, "Modeling of resonantly
pumped mid-infrared pr 3+-doped chalcogenide fiber amplifier with different pumping schemes", Vol.
26, No. ( 2018) OPTICS EXPRESS 23641

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Thank you!

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