Enhancing performance of optical communication systems with advanced optical signal processing

Growing needs to transport large amount of data, penetration of multimedia into our daily lives, and quickly expanding e-commerce sector triggered an unparallel demand for the new generation of fast, secure, and energy savvy communication networks. Today we already benefit from many advances which revolutionized data and voice communication. Commercially deployed dense wavelength division multiple access (DWDMA) networks today are capable of transporting tens of gigabits of data per second over a single WDM channel thus offering tremendous aggregate data throughputs over a single optical fibre. As a consequence, new bottlenecks have emerged at the fibre endpoints where data detection, routing, and switching must take place. Today´s routers use electronics to process all incoming optical traffic. However the available bandwidth offered by current electronics can no longer keep up with these rapidly growing demands. To address these challenges and with goal in mind to eliminate this bottleneck, the research community has been looking long and hard for appropriate alternative solutions. One of taken approaches can be described as optical signal processing. As we will demonstrate it can be very powerful tool to improve performance of advanced communication networks.