Section 1 DWDM Overview

Objectives:
To master the concepts of DWDM.
To know the background and technology characteristics of DWDM.

1.1 DWDM Technology Background

With the dramatic increase of voice services and emergence of
various new services, especially the quick change of IP technology,
network capacity will inevitably be faced with critical challenge.
Traditional methods for transmission network capacity expansion
adopt space division multiplexing (SDM) or time division
multiplexing (TDM).
1. Space Division Multiplexing (SDM)
Space division multiplexing linearly expands the transmission
capacity by adding fibers, and the transmission equipment is also
linearly added.
At present, fiber manufacture technology is quite mature. Ribbon
optical fiber cables with tens of cores are rather prevalent and
advanced connection technique for optical fiber simplifies cable
construction. However, the increment of fibers brings much
inconvenience to the construction and circuit maintenance in the
future. Additionally, if the existing optical fiber cable lines have no
sufficient fibers and require to lay new fiber cables for capacity
expansion, engineering cost will increase in duplication. Moreover,
this method doesn't sufficiently utilize the transmission bandwidth of
the optical fiber and wastes the bandwidth resources. It's not always
possible to lay new optical fibers to expand the capacity during the
construction of communication networks. Actually, in the initial
stage of the project, it is hard to predict the ever-growing service
demands and to plan the number of fibers to lay. Hence, SDM
method for capacity expansion is quite limited.
2. Time Division Multiplexing (TDM)
TDM is a commonly used method for capacity expansion, e.g.
multiplexing of the primary group to the fourth group of the
traditional PDH, and STM-1, STM-4, STM-16 and STM-64 of
current SDH. TDM technology can enhance the capacity of optical
transmission information in duplication and greatly reduce the circuit
cost in equipment and line. Moreover, it is easy to extract specific
digital signals from the data stream via this multiplexing method. It
is especially suitable for networks requiring the protection strategy
of self-healing rings.
However, TDM method has two disadvantages. Firstly, it affects
services. An overall upgrade to higher rate levels requires to replace
the network interfaces and equipment completely. Thus the
equipment in operation must be interrupted during the upgrade
process. Secondly, rate upgrade lacks of flexibility. Let's take SDH
as an example, when a system with a line rate of 155Mbit/s is
required to provide two 155Mbit/s channels, the only way is to
upgrade the system to 622Mbit/s even though two 155Mbit/s are
unused.
For TDM equipment of higher rate, the cost is relatively high.
Furthermore, 40Gbit/s TDM equipment has already reached the rate
limitation of electronic devices. Even the nonlinear effects of
10Gbit/s rate in different fiber types will set various limitations to
transmission.
Currently, TDM is a commonly used capacity expansion method. It
can implement capacity expansion via continuous system rate
upgrade. When certain rate level is reached, other solutions must be
found because of characteristic limitations of devices, lines, etc.
All the basic transmission networks, whether using SDM or TDM to
expand the capacity, adopt traditional PDH or SDH technology, i.e.
utilizing optical signals on a single wavelength for transmission. This
transmission method is a great waste of optical capacity because the
bandwidth of optical fiber is almost infinite when compared to the
single wavelength channel we currently use. We are worrying about
the jam of networks, on the other hand huge network resources are
being wasted.
DWDM technology emerged under this background. It greatly
increases the network capacity, makes full use of the bandwidth
resources of optical fibers and cuts down the waste of network
resources.
1.2 DWDM Theory Overview
DWDM technology utilizes the bandwidth and low attenuation
characteristics of single mode optical fiber, adopts multiple
wavelengths as carriers and allows them to transmit in the fiber
simultaneously.
When compared to common single channel systems, dense-WDM
(DWDM) greatly increases the network capacity and makes full use
of the bandwidth resources of optical fibers. Moreover, DWDM has
many advantages such as simple capacity expansion and reliable
performances. Especially, it can access various types of services and
this gives it a bright prospective of application.
In analog carrier communication systems, the frequency division
multiplexing (FDM) method is often adopted to make full use of the
bandwidth resources of cables and enhance the transmission capacity
of the system, i.e. transmitting several channels of signals
simultaneously in a single cable and, at the receiver end, utilizing
band-pass filters to filter the signal on each channel according to the
frequency differences among the carriers.
Similarly, in optical fiber communication systems, optical frequency
division multiplexing method can also be used to enhance the
transmission capacity of the systems. In fact, this multiplexing
method is very effective in optical communication systems. Unlike
the frequency division multiplexing in analog carrier communication
systems, optical fiber communication systems utilize optical
wavelengths as signal carriers, divide the low attenuation window of
optical fibers into several channels according to the frequency (or
wavelength) difference of each wavelength channel and implement
multiplexing transmission of multi-hannel optical signals in a single
fiber.
Since some optical components (such as narrow-bandwidth optical
filters and coherent lasers) are currently not mature, it is difficult to
implement ultra-dense optical frequency division multiplexing
(coherent optical communication technology) of optical channels.
However, alternate-channel optical frequency division multiplexing
can be implemented based on current component technical level.
Usually, multiplexing with a larger channel spacing (even in
different windows of optical fibers) is called optical wavelength
division multiplexing (WDM), and WDM in the same window with
smaller channel spacing is called dense wavelength division
multiplexing (DWDM). With the progress of technologies,
nanometer level multiplexing can be implemented by using modern
technologies. Even sub-nanometer level multiplexing can be
implemented but merely with stricter component technical
requirements. Hence, multiplexing of 8, 16, 32 or more wavelengths
with smaller wavelength spacing is called DWDM.
The diagram of DWDM system structure and optical spectrum is
shown in Figure 1-1. At the transmit end, optical transmitters output
optical signals of different wavelengths whose accuracy and stability
meet certain requirements. These signals are multiplexed via an
optical wavelength multiplexer and sent to an erbium-doped optical
fiber power amplifier (it is mainly used to compensate the power loss
aroused by the multiplexer and enhance the launched power of the
optical signals). After amplification, this multi-channel optical signal
is sent to the optical fiber for transmitting. In the midway optical line
amplifiers can be installed or not according to practical conditions.
At the receiver end, the signals are amplified by the optical pre-
amplifier (it is mainly used to enhance receiving sensitivity and
prolong transmission distance) and sent to the optical wavelength de-
multiplexer which separates them into the original multi-channel
optical signals.

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Optical booster Optical line Optical line

OTU amplifier amplifier amplifier Optical pre-amplifier

Single
Optical
channel
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spectrum spectrum

Wavelength Wavelength

Figure 1-1 The diagram of DWDM system structure and spectrum

1.3 DWDM Equipment Operating Modes

1.3.1 Two-fiber Bi-directional Transmission
As shown in Figure 1-2, a single optical fiber implements only one
directional transmission of optical signals. Hence the same
wavelengths can be reused in two directions.
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Figure 1-2 Two-fiber bi-directional transmission DWDM system

This kind of DWDM system can effectively exploit the huge
bandwidth resources of optical fiber and expand the transmission
capacity of a single optical fiber in several or tens of times. In long-
haul networks, capacity can be expanded by adding wavelengths
gradually according to the demands of practical traffic, which is very
flexible. This is, under the condition that the actual fiber dispersion
isn't known, also an approach to use multiple 2.5Gbit/s systems to
implement ultra-large capacity transmission, avoiding adopting
ultrahigh speed optical systems.
1.3.2 Single fiber Bi-directional Transmission
As shown in Figure 1-3, a single fiber transmits optical signals of
two directions simultaneously, and the signals in the two different
directions should be assigned on different wavelengths.
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Figure 1-3 The DWDM system which adopts single fiber bi-
directional transmission

Single fiber bi-directional transmission allows a single fiber to carry

full duplex channels and, generally, saves one half of the fiber
components of unidirectional transmission. Since signals transmitted
in the two directions do not interact and create FWM (Four-Wave
Mixing) products, its total FWM products are much less than two-
fiber unidirectional transmission. However, the disadvantage of this
system is that it requires a special measure to deal with the light
reflection (including discrete reflection resulted by optical
connectors and Rayleigh backward reflection of the fiber) to avoid
multi-path interference. When the optical signal needs to be
amplified to elongate prolong transmission distance, components
such as bi-directional optical fiber amplifier and optical circulator
must be adopted, but their noise factor is a little worse.
1.3.3 Add and Drop of Optical Signals

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Figure 1-4 Optical add and drop transmission

By utilizing optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM), optical signals
of the wavelengths can be added and dropped in the intermediate
stations, i.e. implementing add/drop of optical paths. This method
can be used to implement ring type networking of DWDM systems.
At present, OADM can only be made as fixed wavelength add/drop
device (as shown in Figure 1-4) and thus the flexibility of this
operating mode is limited.
1.4 Application Modes of DWDM
Generally, DWDM has two application modes:
Open DWDM
Integrated DWDM
The feature of open DWDM system is that it has no special
requirements for multiplex terminal optical interfaces as long as they
meet the optical interface standards defined in ITU-T G.957. The
DWDM system adopts wavelength conversion technology to convert
the optical signal of service into specific wavelength. Optical signals
from different terminal equipment are converted into different
wavelengths meeting the ITU-T recommendation, then multiplexed.
Integrated DWDM system, without adopting wavelength conversion
technology, requires that the optical signal wavelengths of the
multiplex terminal meets DWDM system specifications. Different
multiplex terminal transmits different wavelengths meeting the ITU-
T recommendation. Thus, when connected to the multiplexer, these
wavelengths occupy different channels and multiplexing is
implemented.
Different application modes can be adopted according to the
demands of engineering. In practical applications, open DWDM and
integrate DWDM can be mixed.
1.5 Advantages of DWDM
The capacity of optical fiber is huge. However, traditional optical
fiber communication systems, with one optical signal in a single
fiber, only exploited a little part of the abundant bandwidth of optical
fiber. To effectively use the huge bandwidth resources of optical
fiber and increase its transmission capacity, a new generation optical
fiber communication technology based on dense-WDM (DWDM)
has emerged.
DWDM technology has the following features:
1. Ultra-large capacity
The transmittable bandwidth of currently commonly used
conventional fiber is very wide, but the utilization ratio is still low.
By using DWDM technology, the transmission capacity of a single
optical fiber is increased by several, tens of or even hundreds of times
when compared to the transmission capacity of single wavelength
systems. Recently, NEC Company, Japan, implemented a
13220Gbit/s experimental DWDM system with a transmission
distance of 120km. This system, with a total bandwidth of 35nm
(1529nm~1564nm) and a channel spacing of 33GHz, can transmit 40
million telephone calls.
2. Data rate "transparency"
DWDM systems conduct multiplexing and de-multiplexing in terms
of optical wavelength differences and are independent to signal rates
and modulation modes, i.e. transparent to the data. Hence, they can
transmit signals with completely different transmission
characteristics and implement combination and separation of various
electrical signals, including digital signals and analog signals, and
PDH signals and SDH signals.
3. Utmost protection of the existing investment during system
upgrade
During the expansion and development of the network, it is an ideal
approach to implement capacity expansion without the need to
rebuild the optical fiber cables and with the only requirement of
replacing the optical transmitters and receivers. This is also a
convenient way to introduce broad-band services (such as CATV,
HDTV and B-ISDN). Furthermore, any new services or new capacity
can be introduced simply by adding an additional wavelength.
4. High flexibility, economy and reliability of networking
When compared to the traditional networks using electrical TDM
networks, new communication networks based on DWDM
technology are greatly simplified in architecture and have clear
network layers. Dispatching of various services can be implemented
simply by adjusting the corresponding wavelengths of the optical
signals. Because of the simple network architecture, clear layers and
convenient service grooming, the flexibility, economy and reliability
of networking are obvious.
5. Compatibility with all optical switching
It is foreseeable that, in the realizable all optical networks in the
future, processing such as add/drop and connection of all
telecommunication services is implemented by changing and
adjusting the optical signal wavelengths. So DWDM technology is
one of the key technologies to implement all optical networks.
Moreover, DWDM systems can be compatible with future all optical
networks. It is possible to implement transparent and highly
survivable all optical networks based on the existing DWDM system.
Section 2 DWDM Transmission Media

Objectives:
To master basic structures and types of optical fibers.
To know basic characteristics of optical fibers.

2.1 Optical Fiber Structures

The kernel of optical fiber used in communication systems consists of
a cylindrical glass core and a glass cladding. The outermost layer is a
plastic wear-resisting coating. The whole fiber is cylindrical. The
typical structure of optical fiber is shown in Figure 2-1.

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Figure 2-1 The typical structure of optical fiber

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