All optical techniques for ultra-high speed systems

The main remaining transmission capacity barriers in high-speed fiber communication systems operating at 1550 nm are the fiber chromatic dispersion and fiber nonlinearities. In addition, at very high bit-rates the electronics is not capable of handling the data. Potential solutions to these problems are to use wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) or optical time division multiplexing (O-TDM) or both. This paper addresses some of the O-TDM techniques.