Very-high-speed fibre-optic networks for broadband communications

Single-mode optical fibres have an enormous transmission bandwidth which can support ultra-high-speed digital transmission and networking. The use of electrical signal-processing, however, ultimately limits the network capacity. To eliminate the throughput bottleneck, all-optical processing techniques should be employed in a fibre-optic network. This paper discusses several schemes for implementing optical time division multiple access (OTDMA) networks with the emphasis on optical clock distribution, synchronisation and all-optical detection. The use of a fast-switching bistable laser diode as an all-optical threshold detector and data regenerator is suggested. A dual-wavelength OTDMA technique is investigated, which can be used for digital TV or future HDTV distributions. Moreover, an efficient multiple access scheme, called wavelength division multiple access with optical time division multiplexing (WDMA-OTDM), is proposed for broadband communication services. It is shown that WDMA-OTDM has all the advantages possessed by the individual OTDMA and WDMA schemes but offers improved flexibility and capacity