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Evolving Optical Fiber Designs Kevin M. Able

TelecommunicationsProducts Division Coming Incorporated Coming, NY 14831

Abstract
The introduction of optical amplifiers early this decade, combined with the advancement of transmitter and multiplexing technology, has allowed the bundling of many transmission channels onto a single fiber. This has occurred simultaneously with an increasing demand for information carrying capacity driven by everything from deregulation to an explosion in internet use. To meet these challenges, fiber manufacturers are evolving new fiber designs to facilitate changing transmission techniques. This paper will discuss the driving forces behind new fiber designs, and examine some of the advances that have been made, including dispersion compensating fiber, non-zero dispersion shifted fiber, and large effective area fiber.

Introduction
The workhorse of optical fibers since 1983 has been the unshifted single-mode fiber, SMF. Optimized for operation at the 1310 nm wavelength, it accounts for an installed base of tens of millions of kilometers of fiber. Early installations operated at bit rates in the hundreds of megabits per second range, while today system upgrades over the same fiber are approaching 10 Gb/s and beyond. In fact, standard single-mode fiber was proven to be so capable, even for operation at 1550 nm (albeit at reduced distances and data rates), it became a widespread belief that single-mode fiber had unlimited bandwidth, and all that was required was a change in electronics to increase the informationcarrying capacity. Several factors came together in the early 1990s to change that view. As illustrated in Figure 1, bandwidth requirements have historically doubled every 24 to 30 months. The optical fiber that had been installed easily met those needs. However, the first years of this decade have seen unparalleled growth in the telecommunicationsindustry. The lure of providing

true broadband service has begun to blur the distinction between voice, video, and data providers. Broad deregulation and interactive services have combined to strain the capacity of the worlds communications infrastructure. In addition, the lack of sufficient fiber counts in early installations has lead to bottlenecks for some carriers who have literally run out of fiber in critical routes. As these carriers struggle to add more capacity, new entrants into the high capacity transport business are constructing new routes. This demand for bandwidth has taxed the capabilities of unshifted fiber at a rate which can not be met economically merely by installing more. Indeed, the demand for optical fiber has grown dramatically, resulting in a reduced supply worldwide. At about the same time, a key facilitator to increasing fiber information carrying capacity was introduced commercially, the erbium doped optical fiber amplifier (EDFA). Electrical signal regenerating and amplifying methods require signal conversion from optical to electrical and back to optical, and must be designed for specific coding schemes and bit rates. EDFAs are all optical, and will amplify whatever signal is input, regardless of structure or bit rate. A broad amplification band means multiple wavelengths can be transmitted simultaneously, effectively increasing available bandwidth by factors of 8, 16, or even 32.
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Figure 1: Transmission data rates have doubled every two years.

Because EDFAs operate in the 1550 nm window, they promised to be a key facilitator for dispersion shifted fiber (DSF), a technology which Coming had first introduced in 1985. By matching the source wavelength with the fiber zero dispersion wavelength, low attenuation, and optical amplification, DSF seemed poised at last to meet the requirements for high data rate, long distance applications.

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Nonlinear Effects
The increased output power inherent in optical amplifiers combined with the simultaneous transmission of multiple wavelengths raised the importance of phenomena which had until then been of academic interest only. Under these new conditions, optical fiber exhibits a nonlinear response, and an entirely new set of issues arose to make the fiber, for the first time, the limiting factor to increased transmission capacity. In addition, a new vocabulary was added to the industry which includes terms such as self phase modulation, cross phase modulation, modulation instability, and four wave mixing. The most troubling of the nonlinear effects is four wave mixing. When multiple signals copropagate, they mix to produce additional channels which can sap power from, and overlap with, the original signals. Figure 2 illustrates this process for three evenly spaced channels, hl, b, b.The and mixing components occur at hxyz = h,+ & - L. Because of the even spacing of the original wavelengths in this example, some of these newly generated signals occur at the original channels.

significantly more complicated for a 32 channel system and 15,872 potential mixing components. The four wave mixilng process is most efficient at the zero dispersion wavelength, in direct conflict with the need to keep fiber dispersion to a minimum to optimize transmission capability. Because standard dispersion shifted fiber has its zero dispersion wavelength within the operating band of EDFAs, these conflicting requirements place limits on the capability of DSF for high data rate long haul networks utilizing wavelength division multiplexing. In response, a new category of optical fiber has been developed; non-zero dispersion shifted fiber, NZDSF.

Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted Fiber

The concept behind NZ-DSF is simple. The zero dispersion wavelength of dispersion shifted fiber is further moved such that it resides outside the EDFAs operating gain band, effectively reintroducing a controlled amount of dispersion into the system. This is depicted in Figure 3, where the and dispersion curves for Corning09 SMF/DSTM SMFLSTM fibers are compared.. The resulting dispersion for the SMF-LS fiber is law enough to provide for long routes, yet not so low that four wave mixing leads easily to system impairment.

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Figure 2: Illustration of the generation of four wave mixing components for three evenly spaced channels.
The total number of mixing components generated, m, is calculated as m = 112 (N3-N2) where N is the number of original channels. For a three channel system this means there are nine additional signals to contend with. For an eight channel system this number increases to 224. One obvious means of minimizing the impact of four wave mixing is to employ uneven channel spacing. However, while this is relatively straight forward for three channels, the task becomes

Figure 3: Diagram of th,e dispersion characteristics of non-zero dispersion shifted fiber compared with standard dispersion shifted fiber relative to the operating gain band of an EDFA.
Using NZ-DSF, 8 x 10 Gbds data rates over 360 kilometers without compensation have been demonstrated.' The ability to combine many data channels onto a single low loss, low dispersion fiber can have a significant cost benefit over utilizing standard SMF. Regeneratorlamplifier spacing can be extended, and

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there is no need to add additional equipment to compensate for dispersion in current typical systems. It has been estimated that savings of as much as 30% to 50% can be realized on the cost of equipping the fiber.

Dispersion Compensation
Notwithstanding the introduction of non-zero dispersion shifted fiber, a significant base of installed unshifted fiber already has been deployed. To effectively utilize this fiber in transmission systems employing optical amplification, a means of reducing the accumulated dispersion resulting from 1550 nm operation over long distances is necessary. To meet that need, manufacturers have introduced dispersion compensating fiber (DCF).At 1550 nm an unshifted single-mode fiber will have dispersion on the order of +I7 ps/nm/km. Although this high dispersion eliminates four wave mixing as a concem, the maximum transmission distance for a given data rate is limited by chromatic dispersion. By the nature of their design, dispersion compensating fibers have high negative dispersion. When placed appropriately within a system link, the large negative dispersion of DCF brings the overall dispersion for the link back to nearly zero, reversing the pulse spreading which occurred as the signal propagated.

management, alternating lengths of positive and negative dispersion fiber are combined in a link in a planned manner. In this way a finite local dispersion is maintained while the overall dispersion is limited to a near zero level. Recent experiments have shown capability reaching 32 channels at 10 Gbls each over 640 kilo meter^.^ Although effective, the drawback to this technique remains that careful planning is required to ensure a low overall dispersion. Restoration or other unanticipated reconfiguration could impair the system unless sufficient margin is designed in. Clearly, the most desirable option is to install a fiber which can not only accommodate todays range of WDM systems, but provide the flexibility for future upgrade.

Large Effective Area Fiber By increasing the light carrying cross section of the fiber, the path average intensity can be lowered for a given total power. The advantages to this increase in effective area include higher power handling capability, higher signal to noise ratio, lower bit error ratio, longer amplifier spacing, and most importantly, higher information carrying capacity. Typical dispersion shifted fibers have effective areas of approximately 50 pm. Large effective area fibers with areas as large as 92 pm2have been r e ~ o r t e d . ~ shown in Figure 5 , an immediate As benefit to this increased effective area is a reduction in the amount of power funneled into four wave mixing components. This implies higher power handling capabilities, and consequently longer amplifier spacing. This is further illustrated in Figure 6, which plots optical amplifier spacing as a function of effective area. Another advantage is the capability for future upgrade to very high bit rate, dense WDM. Only just recently systems have begun to explore 10 Gb/s data rates. Although the next step, 40 Gblslchannel, will be some time in the future, NZ-DSF large effective area fiber will provide the platform capable of handling these information rates over the entire EDFA gain band. Both of these benefits, reduced amplifier counts and increased spacing, and the ability to easily upgrade to higher data rates, translate directly into reduced installation and operating costs.

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Figure 4: 10 Gbls upgrade scenario for existing SMF installations.

This technique has allowed the use of unshifted single-mode fiber at 10 Gbls over hundreds of kilometers. A typical upgrade scenario is illustrated in Figure 4. Nevertheless, the need for increased bandwidth has been steady, and the capabilities of dispersion compensated standard fiber installations, and even NZ-DSF fiber, eventually will be strained. To meet the drive for even greater numbers of operating channels on new builds, several methods have been proposed. The first utilizes a variation of dispersion compensation. Generally referred to as dispersion

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hundred kilometers. The development of non-zero dispersion shifted fiber far new builds provides the advantage of low uncompensated dispersion, low attenuation, and a reductilon in four wave mixing effects. Next generation fibers must also be capable of minimizing the impact of nonlinear effects, and be able to accommodate the transport of hundreds of information channels. Fibers with large effective area will fill this need by providing a platform which encompasses the flexibility to accommodate a range of wavelength plans, information carrying capacity for now and into the future, and cost effectiveness. V. da Silva et al., Errorfree 8 x 10 Gbh WDM transmission over 360 km of non-zero dispersionshifted fiber without dispersion management, Postdeadline paper presented ilt the Optical Fiber Communication Conference, Dallas, Texas, February 1996. 2 P. Palumbo, Bandwidth! needs spur fiber diversity, Liphtwave, Nashua, NH: I?ennWell Publishing, pp. 1, November, 1996 A. Srivastava et al., 32 .x 10 G b h WDM transmission over 640 km using broad band, gainflattened erbium-doped silica fiber amplifiers, Postdeadline paper presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conferens, Dallas, Texas, February 16-21, 1997. Y . Liu, Dispersion shifted large-effective-area fiber for amplified high-capacity long-distance systems, Proceedings of the Optical Fiber Communications Conference, Dallas, Texas, February 16-21, 1997.

Figure 5: Four wave mixing component power comparison between non-zero dispersion shifted fiber and large effective area fiber. System model results for two channels with 100 GHz spacing over 90 kilometers.

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Figure 6: Optical amplifier spacing as a function of effective area. Summary

Deregulation, competition, and expanded services all have played a part in the hunger for bandwidth. A continued increase in this requirement has been responsible for the development of cost effective technologies to meet that demand. Foremost among these advancements has been the successful simultaneous deployment of optical amplifiers and wavelength division multiplexing. Moreover, the move to full utilization of the 1550 nm operating window has spurred activity to introduce other enabling technologies. Dispersion compensating fiber has facilitated a means of utilizing the vast installed base of standard single-mode fiber at bit
rates of 10 Gb/s/channel over distances of several