Long-haul undersea communications systems: hardware redundancy techniques for ultra-reliability

This work reviews possible hardware-redundancy techniques for long-haul fiberoptic communications systems designed to operate undersea. Approaches are analyzed from a complexity viewpoint, taking into account overall system supervisory techniques, fiber-routing considerations and repair strategies and reducing the options to a short list of four on this basis. These four options are compared via a detailed reliability analysis employing the matrix method, a recently developed algorithm based on Markov theory.<>