Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The optical fibre communication network forms the backbone of the global communication infrastructure on which all Internet traffic relies. Since their commercial deployment in the 1980s, optical fibres have been considered as offering plenty of capacity and being able to sustain the growth in data traffic. However, the tremendous traffic growth rates experienced in the past decade call for a substantially faster optical data transmission preferably over the existing fibre deployments. This research project is dedicated toward serving this need.The proposed research revolves around the concept of optical superchannels, which combine multiple wavelength channels to accomplish higher end-to-end rates. To increase the amount of traffic supported by existing fibres, our research team will develop methods to pack data more densely into these superchannels and to allow superchannels to adapt to the current demand for traffic through a optical fibre network. This will be accomplished through sophisticated signal processing methods that organize the data transmission at the optical transmitter and that compensate for the various impairments and in particular crosstalk of densely packed data streams at the receiver. As typically the case for the effective development of communication methods, this part of the project will heavily rely on computer simulations for performance evaluation. In the second part of the project, we will demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the developed innovations in hardware. We will target an implementation in a field-programmable gate array, a device typically used in academia and industry to explore the design space and prototype integrated circuits. The research team consists of experienced faculty members and enthusiastic graduate student researchers and is supported by experts from one of the leading vendors of optical fibre communication solutions. The research program will provide excellent training opportunities for the students, making them ready to join the Canadian information and communication technology sector after graduation.