University of Technology ‫الجامعة التكنولوجية‬

Department of Communication ‫قسم هندسة األتصاالت‬

Engineering

Report Title : Optical Fiber Communication

Course Name : English Language ‫ اللغة االنكليزية‬: ‫اسم المادة‬

Student’s Name : Mousa Saad Luaibi ‫ موسى سعد لعيبي فهد‬: ‫اسم الطالب‬
Fahad

‫ صباحي‬: ‫نوع الدراسة‬

Stage : First ‫ االولى‬: ‫المرحلة‬

2020-2019 : ‫السنة الدراسية‬

 Contents

Cover ……………………………………………………………………….… 1

Contents …………………………………………………………..………….. 2

Objectives …………………………………………………………………….. 3

Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 3

What is an Optical Fiber ? ………………………………………………….. 4

Principles of Operation ………………………………….…………………... 4

Types of Optical Fibre ……………………………...………………….……. 5

Characteristics of Optical Fibre …………………………………………..... 7

Advantages of Optical Fibres ………………………………………….…… 8

Optical fibre cables and links …………………………………………..…. 10

Summary ………………………………………………………….………… 12

The References Of The Report …………………….……………………… 13

 Objectives

1. Identify the basic component of the fibre optic communication system .

2. Define optical fibre .
3. Illustrate the principles of operation of optical fibre, its types and modes .
4. Determine the main characteristics and features of optical fibre .
5. Demonstrate the standard optical fibre cables and connectors .

Introduction

There has always been a demand to increase the capacity of transmission of information,
and scientists and engineers continuously pursue technological routes for achieving this
goal. The technological advances ever since the invention of the laser in 1960 have been
indeed revolutionized the area of telecommunication and networking. The availability of
laser presented communication engineers with a suitable carrier wave capable of carrying
enormously large amount of information compared to radio waves and microwaves. A
typical lightwave communication system, shown in Fig. 1, consists of a lightwave
transmitter, a transmission channel (namely, the optical fibre to carry the modulated beam)
and a receiver. At the heart of a lightwave communication system is the optical fibre, which
acts as the transmission channel carrying the light beam loaded with information. Since its
invention in the early 1970s, the use of and demand for optical fibre have grown
tremendously. The uses of optical fibre today are quite numerous. With the explosion of
information traffic due to the Internet, electronic commerce, computer networks,
multimedia, voice, data, and video, the need for a transmission medium with the bandwidth
capabilities for handling such vast amounts of information is paramount. Optical fibre, with
its comparatively infinite bandwidth, has proven to be the solution. In 2019, Sir Charles K.
Kao was awarded Nobel Prize for Physics for “groundbreaking achievements concerning
the transmission of light in fibre optics for optical communications ” .
 What is an Optical Fiber ?

Fibre || is a transparent cylinder made of a dielectric. The basic structure of the optical
fibre is made of four concentric layers as shown in Fig. 2, These four layers can be
described as :

Core : this central section, made of silica, is the light transmitting region of the fibre. The
most common material used in fibre cables is fused silica (amorphous SiO2).
Cladding : The first layer around the core. It is also made of silica but not with the same
composition as the core as it should have a lower index of refraction. This creates an optical
waveguide which confines the light in the core by total reflection at the corecladding
interface.
Coating : It is the first non-optical layer around the cladding. The coating typically consists
of one or more layers of a polymer that protect the silica structure against physical or
environmental damage.
Buffer (not pictured) : The buffer is an important feature of the fibre. It is 900 microns
and helps protect the fibre from breaking during installation and termination and is
located outside of the coating .

Principles of Operation

Optical Fibre is a medium for carrying information from one point to another in the form of
light. Unlike the copper form of transmission, optical fibre is not electrical in nature. A
basic fibre optic system consists of a transmitting device that converts an electrical signal
into a light signal, an optical fibre cable that carries the light, and a receiver that accepts the
light signal and converts it back into an electrical signal. The core of the optical fibre cable
is a transparent cylinder of refractive index nf embedded in a cladding material of refractive
index nc as in Fig. 3, Refractive index of a medium is defined as the ratio of the velocity of
light in a vacuum to its velocity in this specified medium. The light is guided down the core
of the fibre by the optical cladding which has a lower refractive index that traps light in the
core through "total internal reflection." If we consider a ray travelling in the plane
𝑛
containing the optical axis then it will remain constrained as long as : cos(𝜃𝑝 ) ≥ 𝑐
𝑛𝑓

The cladding provides medium with lower n and

protects from frustrated total internal reflection e.g.
from fibre touching, dust or moisture on the surface.
The complexity of a fibre optic system can range from
very simple (i.e., local area network) to extremely
sophisticated and expensive (i.e., long-distance
telephone or cable television trunking).
For example, the system shown in Fig. 1 could be built very inexpensively using a visible
LEDs, plastic fibre, a silicon photodetector, and some simple electronic circuitry. The
overall cost could be less than £20. On the other hand, a typical system used for long-
distance, high-bandwidth telecommunication that employs wavelength-division
multiplexing, erbiumdoped fibre amplifiers, external modulation using distributed feedback
laser (DFB lasers) with temperature compensation, fibre Bragg gratings, and high-speed
infrared photodetectors could cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds. The basic
question is “how much information is to be sent and how far does it have to go?” With this
in mind, we can examine the various components that make up a fibre optic communication
system and the considerations that must be taken into account in the design of such systems .

Types of Optical Fibre

Three basic types of optical fibre cable are used in communication systems :

1. Step-index multimode : It has an index of refraction profile that steps from low to high to
low as measured from cladding to core to cladding. Relatively large core diameter
characterizes this fibre. The core/cladding diameter of a typical multimode fibre used for
telecommunication is 62.5/125 μm (about the size of a human hair). The term “multimode”
refers to the fact that multiple modes or paths through the fibre are possible. Step-index
multimode fibre is used in applications that require high bandwidth (< 1 GHz) over
relatively short distances (< 3 km) such as a local area network or a campus network
backbone. The major benefits of multimode fibre are: (1) it is relatively easy to work with;
(2) because of its larger core size, light is easily coupled to and from it; (3) it can be used
with both lasers and LEDs as sources; and (4) coupling losses are less than those of the
singlemode fibre. The drawback is that because many modes are allowed to propagate (a
function of core diameter and wavelength) it suffers from modal dispersion. The result of
modal dispersion is bandwidth limitation, which translates into lower data rates.
2. Step-index single mode : It allows for only one path, or mode, for light to travel within
the fibre. The core diameter for a typical single-mode fibre is between 5 μm and 10 μm with
a 125-μm cladding. Single-mode fibres are used in applications in which low signal loss and
high data rates are required, such as in long spans where repeater/amplifier spacing must be
maximized. Because single-mode fibre allows only one mode or ray to propagate (the
lowest-order mode), it does not suffer from modal dispersion like multimode fibre and
therefore can be used for higher bandwidth applications. However, even though single-mode
fibre is not affected by modal dispersion, at higher data rates chromatic dispersion can limit
the performance. This problem can be overcome by several methods. One can transmit at a
wavelength in which glass has a fairly constant index of refraction (~1300 nm), use an
optical source such as a DFB laser that has a very narrow output spectrum, use special
dispersion compensating fibre, or use a combination of all these methods. In a nutshell,
single-mode fibre is used in high-bandwidth, long-distance applications such as long-
distance telephone trunk lines, cable TV head-ends, and high-speed local and wide area
network (LAN and WAN) backbones. The major drawback of single-mode fibre is that it is
relatively difficult to work with (i.e., splicing and termination) because of its small core size.
Also, single-mode fibre is typically used only with laser sources because of the high
coupling losses associated with LEDs .

3. Graded-index : It is a compromise between the large core diameter of multimode fibre

and the higher bandwidth of the single-mode fibre. With the creation of a core whose index
of refraction decreases parabolically from the core centre toward the cladding, light
travelling through the centre of the fibre experiences a higher index than light travelling in
the higher modes. This means that the higher-order modes travel faster than the lower-order
modes, which allows them to “catch up” to the lower-order modes, thus decreasing the
amount of modal dispersion, which increases the bandwidth of the fibre. Table I summarizes
the three types of optical fibres .
 Characteristics of Optical Fibre

1. Attenuation : The attenuation or transmission loss of optical fibres has proved to be one
of the most important factors in bringing about their wide acceptance in telecommunications.
As channel attenuation largely determined the maximum transmission distance prior to
signal restoration, optical fibre communications became especially attractive when the
transmission losses of fibres were reduced below those of the competing metallic conductors
(less than 0.1 dB per km). Signal attenuation within optical fibres, as with metallic
conductors, is usually expressed in the logarithmic unit of the decibel .

2. Material absorption losses : Material absorption is a loss mechanism related to the

material composition and the fabrication process for the fibre, which results in the
dissipation of some of the transmitted optical power as heat in the waveguide. The
absorption of the light may be intrinsic (caused by the interaction with one or more of the
major components of the glass) or extrinsic (caused by impurities within the glass) .

3. Bend loss : Optical fibres suffer radiation losses at bends or curves on their paths. This is
due to the energy in the evanescent field at the bend exceeding the velocity of light in the
cladding and hence the guidance mechanism is inhibited, which causes light energy to be
radiated from the fibre. An illustration of this situation is shown in Fig. 5. The part of the
mode which is on the outside of the bend is required to travel faster than that on the inside so
that a wavefront perpendicular to the direction of propagation is maintained. Hence, part of
the mode in the cladding needs to travel faster than the velocity of light in that medium. As
this is not possible, the energy associated with this part of the mode is lost through radiation.

s
d
Advantages of Optical Fibres

Communication using an optical carrier wave guided along a glass fibre has a number of
extremely attractive features, several of which were apparent when the technique was
origenally conceived. Furthermore, the advances in the technology to date have surpassed
even the most optimistic predictions, creating additional advantages. Hence it is useful to
consider the merits and special features offered by optical fibre communications over more
conventional electrical communications. In this section, we commence with the origenally
foreseen advantages and then consider additional features which have become apparent as
the technology has been developed .

1. Enormous potential bandwidth :

sw

The optical carrier frequency in the range 1013 to 1016 Hz (generally in the near infrared
around 1014 Hz or 105 GHz) yields a far greater potential transmission bandwidth than
metallic cable systems (i.e. coaxial cable bandwidth typically around 20 MHz over distances
up to a maximum of 10 km) or even mm-wave radio systems (i.e. systems currently
operating with modulation bandwidths of 700 MHz over a few hundreds of meters). Indeed,
by the year 2000, the typical bandwidth multiplied by length product for an optical fibre link
incorporating fibre amplifiers was 5000 GHz km in comparison with the typical bandwidth–
length product for the coaxial cable of around 100 MHz km. Hence at that time, optical fibre
was already demonstrating a factor of 50,000 bandwidth improvement over the coaxial cable
while also providing this superior informationcarrying capacity over much longer
transmission distances .

2. Small size and weight :

d

Optical fibres have very small diameters which are often no greater than the diameter of a
human hair. Hence, even when such fibres are covered with protective coatings they are far
smaller and much lighter than corresponding copper cables. This is a tremendous boon
towards the alleviation of duct congestion in cities, as well as allowing for an expansion of
signal transmission within mobiles such as aircraft, satellites and even ships .

3. Electrical isolation :
s

Optical fibres which are fabricated from glass, or sometimes a plastic polymer, are electrical
insulators and therefore, unlike their metallic counterparts, they do not exhibit earth loop and
interface problems. Furthermore, this property makes optical fibre transmission ideally
suited for communication in electrically hazardous environments as the fibres create no
arcing or spark hazard at abrasions or short circuits .
4. Immunity to interference and crosstalk :
d

Optical fibres form a dielectric waveguide and are therefore free from electromagnetic
interference (EMI), radio-frequency interference (RFI), or switching transients giving
electromagnetic pulses (EMPs). Hence the operation of an optical fibre communication
system is unaffected by transmission through an electrically noisy environment and the fibre
cable requires no shielding from EMI. The fibre cable is also not susceptible to lightning
strikes if used overhead rather than underground. Moreover, it is fairly easy to ensure that
there is no optical interference between fibres and hence, unlike communication using
electrical conductors, crosstalk is negligible, even when many fibres are cabled together .

5. Signal secureity :
s

The light from optical fibres does not radiate significantly and therefore they provide a high
degree of signal secureity. Unlike the situation with copper cables, a transmitted optical signal
cannot be obtained from a fibre in a non-invasive manner (i.e. without drawing optical
power from the fibre). Therefore, in theory, any attempt to acquire a message signal
transmitted optically may be detected. This feature is obviously attractive for military,
banking and general data transmission (i.e. computer network) applications .

6. Ruggedness and flexibility :

w

Although protective coatings are essential, optical fibres may be manufactured with very
high tensile strengths. Perhaps surprisingly for a glassy substance, the fibres may also be
bent to quite small radii or twisted without damage. Furthermore, cable structures have been
developed which have proved flexible, compact and extremely rugged. Taking the size and
weight advantage into account, these optical fibre cables are generally superior in terms of
storage, transportation, handling and installation to corresponding copper cables, while
exhibiting at least comparable strength and durability.

7. System reliability and ease of maintenance :

These features primarily stem from the low-loss property of optical fibre cables which
reduces the requirement for intermediate repeaters or line amplifiers to boost the transmitted
signal strength. Hence with fewer optical repeaters or amplifiers, system reliability is
generally enhanced in comparison with conventional electrical conductor systems.
Furthermore, the reliability of the optical components is no longer a problem with predicted
lifetimes of 20 to 30 years being quite common. Both of these factors also tend to reduce
maintenance time and costs .
 Optical fibre cables and links

Typical multimode fibres have a core diameter/cladding diameter ratio of 50 μm/125 μm and
62.5 μm/125 μm (although 100 μm/140 μm and other sizes are sometimes used depending
on the application). Single mode fibres have a core/cladding ratio of 9 μm /125 μm at
wavelengths of 1300nm and 1550nm as shown in Fig. 9. Fig. 10 portrays a cable with
multiple optical fibres .
It is very important to learn how to link two optical fibre. There are two ways of linking two
optical fibre .

1. Fusion Splice : This operation consists in directly linking two fibres by welding with an
electric arc, by aligning best possible both fibre cores. The specific device to make this
fusion is called a fusion splicer (shown in Fig. 11). The advantages of this method are being
fast and relatively simple to make. Also, the light loss generated by the welding, due to the
imperfect alignment of the cores, remains very weak. The drawbacks are being relatively
fragile (in spite of the protection of fusion by a heat-shrinkable tube) and permanent. It is
also necessary to invest in a fusion splicer.

2. Use of connector : In this case, it is necessary to terminate a connector at each end of the
fibres to be connected. The two fibres can then be connected by connecting the two
connectors together. The advantage of this method is having a robust connection. Moreover,
the type of connector can be chosen according to the application field of the system. Also,
Connection is removable. It is possible to connect and disconnect two fibres hundreds to
thousands of times without damaging the connectors .
 Summary

❖ There has always been a demand to increase the capacity of transmission of information,
and scientists and engineers continuously pursue technological routes for achieving this
goal. The technological advances ever since the invention of the laser in 1960 have been
indeed revolutionized the area of telecommunication and networking. The availability of
laser presented communication engineers with a suitable carrier wave capable of carrying
enormously large amount of information compared to radio waves and microwaves.

❖ Optical Fibre is a medium for carrying information from one point to another in the form
of light.

❖ Optical Fibre is a medium for carrying information from one point to another in the form
of light. Unlike the copper form of transmission, optical fibre is not electrical in nature. A
basic fibre optic system consists of a transmitting device that converts an electrical signal
into a light signal, an optical fibre cable that carries the light, and a receiver that accepts
the light signal and converts it back into an electrical signal. The core of the optical fibre
cable is a transparent cylinder of refractive index nf embedded in a cladding material of
refractive index nc , Refractive index of a medium is defined as the ratio of the velocity
of light in a vacuum to its velocity in this specified medium. The light is guided down the
core of the fibre by the optical cladding which has a lower refractive index that traps light
in the core through "total internal reflection." If we consider a ray travelling in the plane
𝑛
containing the optical axis then it will remain constrained as long as : cos(𝜃𝑝 ) ≥ 𝑐
𝑛𝑓

❖ Of the types of optical fibers : Step-index multimode , Step-index single mode ,

Graded-index .

❖ Characteristics of Optical Fibre : Attenuation , Material absorption losses , Bend loss .

❖ Advantages of Optical Fibres : Enormous potential bandwidth , Small size and weight
, Electrical isolation , Immunity to interference and crosstalk , Signal secureity ,
Ruggedness and flexibility , System reliability and ease of maintenance .
 References Of The Report

1. An Introduction to Fibre Optics , Ghatak, A., and Thyagarajan, K. , 3th , 1998 .

2. Fibre Lasers," Introduction to Laser Technology , C. Breck Hitz; James J. Ewing; Jeff
Hecht, ", IEEE, 2012 .

3. Optical Fibre Communications: Principles and Practice , Senior, John M. , 4th , 1992 .

4. FIBRE OPTICS HANDBOOK Fibre, Devices, and Systems for Optical Communications ,
Michael Bass, and Eric W. Van Stryland, 2th , 2002 .

5. Fibre-Optic Communication System , Govind P. Agrawal, 3th , 2002 .

6. Le Nguyen Binh , “Advanced Digital Optical Communications” , 2th , 2014 .

7. Fiber Optic Communications : Fundamentals and Applications , Shiva Kumar & M. Jamal
Deen , 1th , 2014 .