Multiple Access Techniques for Fiber-Optic Networks

✍ Scribed by Denis J.G. Mestdagh

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 718 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1068-5200
• DOI: 10.1006/ofte.1996.0003

✦ Synopsis

Recent advances and breakthroughs achieved in optical fiber technology have led to the advent of a new generation of fiber systems-Multiaccess Optical Fiber Networks. The huge bandwidth of these networks is revolutionizing the capability of individual nodes, and not surprisingly, multiaccess networks have become the subject of intense activity in the optical fiber communication engineering. The purpose of this tutorial paper is to acquaint the uninitiated reader with the basic concepts as well as the most recent progress of multiple access techniques applied to these networks. It also provides some insights into their characteristics relevant to the design engineer. The four basic multiple access techniques based on wavelength, subcarrier, time, and code degrees of freedom are reviewed theoretically and examples of systems that have been implemented so far are described. However, due to present-day technological limitations, these four basic techniques cannot yet be fully exploited to provide the optimum network performance they can theoretically offer. Therefore, hybrid multiple access schemes that combine these basic techniques in order to benefit from the advantages of each scheme while mitigating the drawbacks of the other ones have been proposed in the professional literature. These hybrid multiple access techniques are also surveyed in this paper.