Adaptive optical transmission for dynamic optical networks

Efforts towards commercializing higher-speed optical transmission have demonstrated the need for advanced modulation formats, several of which require similar transceiver hardware architecture. Adaptive transceivers can be built which have different operational configurations controlled by software. These software-defined transceiver configurations support a set of specific modulation / demodulation formats, with respective data rates and tolerances to system impairments, as well as sets of electronic digital signal processing schemes, chosen to best function in a given network environment. In this paper, we discuss possibilities and advantages of reconfigurable and dynamically-adaptive transceivers, and their potential applications in future optical networks.