1.

Optical communication

The first revolution in the field of communication came when Sir Alexander Graham Bell successfully
converted voice signals into electrical signals which were transmitted on electrical wires and then
converted back to voice signals. This was the major break-through in the field of communication.
Right from this time there has been a continuously increasing need of bandwidth for communication
due to continuously increasing number of users. More people wanted to communicate and thus
large bandwidths were required thereby forcing communication scientists to look for new
possibilities. This increasing trend, of need of large bandwidths, even continues today.

Electromagnetic spectrum and Evolution of Optical fibre communications:

Many forms of communication systems have appeared over the years. The principal motivations
behind each new one were either to improve the transmission fidelity , to increase the data rate so
that more information could be sent, in bandwidth and hence an increased information capacity.
This activity led in turn to the birth of television , radar and microwave links.

The portion of electromagnetic spectrum that is used for electrical communications is shown in
figure.

Anathor important portion of the electromagnetic spectrum empompasses the optical region shown .
in this region it is customary to specify the band of intrest interms of wavelength instead of
frequency as in the radio region.The optical spectrum ranges from about 50nm to about 100μm. The
visible spectrum being 400 to 700 nm band.

Since optical frequencies are very high optical medium can increase the existing bandwidth by 1000
to 10000 times.

Evolution of different transmission mediums

Initial communications started at lower operating frequencies . The bandwidths then required were
also low. Since then the operating frequencies have drastically increased due to large requirements
in bandwidths

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BW α 𝑄

Twisted pair cables:

Initial communications started below 1MHz. Twisted wire pairs was the medium of transmission.BW
then required was very low.Operating frequencies drastically increasd due to large requirements in
bandwidth. Twisted wire pairs could be used at low operating frequency in telephone lines. They
have very high EMI at high frequency and become extreamly lossy at high frequencies.

Coaxial cables:

The medium of transmission that were used for operating frequencies upto about 1GHz were
coaxial cables in which there was a centre conductor surrounded by a layer of dielectric material and
the dielectric material was surrounded by outer metallic layer. The electromagnetic energy travelled,
along the lengths of these cables and was confined in between the two metallic layers. These cables
had a loss figure of about 20db/km. When operating frequencies increased further the coaxial cables
proved to be inadequate and lossy, thereby giving rise to the need of another medium called
waveguides.

Waveguides:

These are basically hollow structures which guide the electromagnetic energy from one point to
another through them. But as the operating frequency further increased to few hundreds of
gigahertz these waveguides too proved to be inadequate as there were no supporting electronic
circuitry available that could operate at such high frequencies.

At such high frequencies, even the size of the electronic component started to show some variations
in the circuit behaviour and the electronic components could no longer be treated as lumped
elements. Hence this led to a strong need of a search for other alternatives because though there
seemed to have appeared a halt in the available technology, but there did not appear any halt in the
ever increasing demand for bandwidth
Great intrest in communicating at optical frequencies was created in 1960s. there were two
questions rising

1. Are there available sources of light for the new technology?

There were lot of sources of light in day to day life for eg, incandescent bulbs, LEDs,
fluorescent lamps, etc.
But light from an ordinary bulb cannot be used to carry or transmit information.carrier signal
in a communication system carries information by virtue of a variation in one or more of its
characteristics like amplitude, frequencyor time period.If we want to use the electric bulb as
a source we need to change the amplitude or frequency of the light emitted by it.
Experiments showed that the rate at which an electric bulb can be switched ONor OFF in
accordance with the information signal is not fast enough . Hence these bulbs and tube
lights are not suitable sources.
Rate at which an optical signal source can be turned ON and OFF depends on the Spectral
Width of the source. Narrow spectral width sources can be operated at high frequencies .
Coincidentally LASERS happened to be invented almost during the same time as the search
for narrow spectral sources was in progress. LASERS happened to have sufficiently narrow
spectral widths and high beam directivity, adequate to be used as optical sources.Initial
LASER diodes emitted lights of wavelengths of about 800nm. Initial optical communication
started with 800nm wavelength due to which it was called the “FIRST OPTICAL WINDOW “ of
optical communication.

2. Does there exists such a wideband and lossless medium for carrying optical signals.

Air:
light from the sun, that is millions of light years away from us, reaches through space and
also the earth atmosphere. Thus air seems very efficient medium for lightpropagation.
A normal incandescent bulb emits light in all directions, if we keep an incandescent bulb , we
will see its glow from a Km or may be 10 Km. but if we go beyond that we will observe its
brightness fade away. Though we feel that air is a very efficient medium of light , its
efficiency reduces to zero after a few Kms.
Hence we cannot accept air medium of light because in the field of communication about
thousands of kilometers are involved . Thus there was a need for special medium to carry
light over such long distances.

Glass:
Physisists were already using glass in the form of prisms or lenses for guiding and focussingg
lights. But in labs light was carried over distances of few meters only. When experiments
were carried out over the loss characteristics of glass it was found that glass had a very hig
attenuation of about 1000dB/Km. Deep study and experimentations proved that the loss
was due to the impurities present in the glass. As soon as this was realised glass began to be
manufactured to the best possible purity in early 1960s.
First purification: on first purification glass had a loss figure of about 20dB/Km. if we used a
purified glass rod as a communication medium it would provide almost the same loss as
would a coaxial cable or waveguide would do, but at bandwitdhs 1000 to 1000 times larger
than them. This attracted scientists to explore this medium further. This was the reason for
moulding glass into the form of fibres that are used for optical communications today.

Structure of an optical communication link:

A typical optical fibre link is as shown in figure:

Optical transmitter:
In the system the transmitter of light source generates a light stream modulated to enable it to
carry the data. Conventionally a pulse of light indicates a "1" and the absence of light indicates
"0". The most commonly used devices are light emitting diodes, LEDs, and semiconductor laser
diodes.

Fibre optic cable

This light is transmitted down a very thin fibre of glass or other suitable material to be presented
at the receiver or detector. In essence a fibre optic cable consists of core, around which is
another layer referred to as the cladding. Outside of this there is a protective outer coating.

The fibre optic cables operate because their cladding has a refractive index that is slightly lower
than that of the core. This means that light passing down the core undergoes total internal
reflection when it reaches the core / cladding boundary, and it is thereby contained within the
core of the optical fibre.

Repeaters and amplifiers:

There is a maximum distance over which signals may be transmitted over fibre optic cabling.
This is limited not only by the attenuation of the cable, but also the distortion of the light signal
along the cable. In order to overcome these effects and transmit the signals over longer
distances, repeaters and amplifiers are used.
Opto-electric repeaters may be used. These devices convert the optical signal into an electrical
format where it can be processed to ensure that the signal is not distorted and then converted
back into the optical format. It may then be transmitted along the next state of the fibre optic
cable.

An alternative approach is to use an optical amplifier. These amplifiers directly amplify the optical
signal without the need to convert the signal back into an electrical format. The amplifiers consist
of a length of fibre optic cable that is doped with a rare earth mineral named Erbium. The treated
fibre cable is then illuminated or pumped with light of a shorter wavelength from another laser
and this serves to amplify the signal that is being carried.

Overall receiver
Although the photo-detector is the major element in the fibre optic receiver, the are other
elements to the whole unit. Once the light has been received by the fibre optic receiver and
converted into electronic pulses, the signals are processed by the electronics in the receiver.
These serve to generate a suitable square wave that can then be processed in any logic circuitry
that may be required.

Optical fibre attenuation as a function of wavelength:

In early 1970’s the manufactured glass after removing the impurities showed a minimum loss
at around 800nm(0.8μm) of about 4dB/Km.at this time GaAs LASERs were also invented.
GaAs intrinsically is capable of emitting light of wavelength 800nm.

Coincidentally we had glass which had minimum loss at the wavelength that was emitted by
LASERs. So it proved to be great combination.Initial optical communications were started at
800nm wavelength region and hence is called as the “ FIRST OPTICAL WINDOW”.

1980s and 1990s

As technology improved, glass was further purified and it showed a region of minimum loss
at 1300nm and 1550nm regions in the 1980s as shown in figure . There was no minimum in
the 800nm window and hence GaAs LASERs could not be used as sources. But in this
course of time the semiconductor material technology had also improved simultaneously and
we had sources available which could emit light both in 1300nm and the 1550nm regions. So,
optical communications were now shifted to these regions and were called as the “Second
Window” and “Third Window” of optical communication. The 1300nm window not only has
low loss but also can support high data rates.

Minimum attenuation in 1300nm window was about 0.5dB/Km and in 1500nm window was
about 0.2dB/Km.Today, most of the optical transmission take place in the 1550nm window
because though the 1300nm window had high bandwidth, it also had higher loss which
significantly affected the performance of the communication system since distances became
considerable large.
 Problems :

A 3-km fiber optic system has an input power of 2 mW and a loss characteristic of 2 dB/km.
Determine the output power of the fiber optic system.
 ADVANTAGES OF OPTICAL COMMUNICATION

1. Communication provides an ultra-high bandwidth for communication of the order of

Terahertz (THz). This advantage meets the first requirement of a high quality reliable
communication system.

2. The loss figure of optical communication is very low, about 0.2 dB/Km. So this
system has high SNR values. This advantage provides a reliable communication system. No
other medium today, can provide such low loss figures as optical medium.

3.Optical communication systems have very low or even negligible electromagnetic

interference (EMI).

4.Optical Communication provides high security data transmission. This is because

optical signal travels through optical fibers which do not allow leakage of light energy. So
tapping of transmitted information is very difficult in optical communication

5.Optical communication systems have very low manufacturing cost. Whatever cost
is incurred is only due to the technology. This is because optical medium glass is made from
silica, which is freely abundant in nature. So, the only cost is in moulding it to a form of
optical medium like optical fibre. The cost per voice channel of an optical fibre is also very
much smaller than cost per voice channel of any other medium like coaxial cable though the
two may have comparable costs per kilometre. This is because the bandwidth of optical fibre
is almost 1000 times larger than a coaxial cable. So, cost per channel of an optical fiber
would be one thousandth of that in a coaxial cable.

6.Applications where space and weight are constraints, optical fiber serves
adequately because optical fibers have low weight and low volume compared to other media.

CHARACTERIZATION OF A LIGHT SOURCE

A very elementary question that may now come to the reader’s mind is how to characterise or
describe a light source? A source of light can be characterized by the following factors:
Intensity of the light:
Intensity of light is defined as the power per unit solid angle. So for a given power of the source,
if the emitted light is scattered into a very
wide solid angle then the source has low intensity. If the emitted light is confined to very narrow
cone, the source appears to be very bright because its intensity increases. This happens in case
of a LASER whose light appears to be much brighter and travels long distance than a normal
60W bulb though the power of the LASER is much smaller than 60W. The intensity of the source
is indicative of how focussed is the emitted light.

Wavelength of Light (λ): The second characteristic on which a source is characterized is the
wavelength of the emitted light. The wavelength of light is indicative of the colour of the light and
so many a times it is also called as the colour of the source. The visible light lies within a
wavelength range of 400nm to 700nm. If we look into figure 2.1, we find that glass which appears
so transparent to us in daily life is not actually that transparent to wavelengths of 400nm to
700nm. In fact, it is much more transparent to lights of wavelengths 1300nm and 1550nm, which
lie in the infrared region. Since these regions are not in the visible range, colour does not have
any meaning, yet we may retain the colour as one of the characteristic to categorize light.
Depending on the desired loss performance of the optical communication system λ can be
chosen either 1300nm or 1550nm. So, the choice of wavelength of transmission has a direct
relation to the SNR of the transmission.

Spectral Width of Source (∆λ): It is basically the wavelength range over which the emission takes
place. In other words, it is the range of wavelengths emitted by the source. Thus the spectral
width may be considered to be indicative of the purity of the colour of the light source. That is, if
we have a source with a wide spectral width, say for example if it emits all the wavelengths
ranging from blue to red, we get a light from the source which will look like white light. If we
reduce the spectral width to near red, we would get a sharp red colour light. If we reduce it to
near blue, we would get a blue coloured light and so on. Thus reducing the spectral width
increases the purity of the colour. Spectral width is a very important parameter of a source
because we would later discover that spectral width of a source is related to the data rate upto
which a source can be used as a transmitter of optical signal. Smaller the value of ∆λ more will
be the purity of the source and also higher would be the data rate of the source. In other words,
higher will be the bandwidth of the
communication system. So, the choice of ∆λ has a direct relation to the bandwidth of the
transmission.

RAY-MODEL OF LIGHT
With the above background of information, let us now move on to discuss the simplest possible
model of light, the ray-model. Fundamentally, we have two main aspects of the ray nature of light.
light rays actually are fictitious lines which in reality represent the direction of propagation of what
are called as phase-fronts of light as shown in figure. Phasefronts are nothing but constant phase
surfaces in which the phase difference between any two points is zero. In reality they represent
the spatial nature of propagation of a wave and hence are also called as wave-fronts. These
phase-fronts may be either spherical or planar in nature and accordingly, we get two aspects of
ray nature of light. A line drawn perpendicular to a phase front at every point gives the direction
of propagation of light energy at that point and is conventionally called as a light-ray. So, light-
rays are actually imaginary lines that determine the direction of propagation of light energy. In
other words, what we actually have is not light ray but the direction of propagation of phase-
fronts of light energy that are represented by directed line segments called light rays.
If we have an isotropic source of light situated at finite distance, as in figure (a), we get spherical
phase-fronts because the light source would emit light in all directions and light waves would
travel spherically outwards from the source of light. If we now draw lines perpendicular to these
phase-fronts at any point, these lines would give the direction of flow of light energy at that point
and the line drawn would then be called a light ray. Due to their spherical nature, the light waves
can be called as spherical waves.
If the same source is now placed at a very large distance from the point of observation (ideally at
infinity) the wave-fronts would appear almost planar and parallel to each other as shown in figure
(b). So the light rays too would now not look divergent, but appear parallel to each other because
they are perpendicular to the phase fronts at every point. The light waves now can be called
plane waves.

Light as an Electromagnetic Wave

Fundamentally, light wave is an electromagnetic wave which is described by Maxwell’s
Equations. It is composed of electric and magnetic fields. These two fields are perpendicular to
each other and to the direction in which the light travels. This is shown in the following figure.
The electric and magnetic field amplitude varies with time as a sine wave, just like a since
function in trigonometry.
Wavelength:
Wavelength is the distance between two nearest amplitude positive peaks. The amplitude rises
from 0 to a positive peak, goes through 0, goes to negative peak, then returns back to 0. This is a
complete cycle and the distance light travels during this cycle is called a wavelength and is
usually represented by the symbol λ. This is shown in the illustration below.

Refractive Index
Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second in vacuum. This is roughly 186,282 miles per
second. This speed of light in vacuum is usually denoted by c. But light travels more slowly when
it passes through a transparent material. The degree of slowing down depends on the material’s
refractive index. Refractive index of a transparent material (denoted by n) is defined as:
n=c/v
where c is the speed of light in vacuum, v is the speed of light (velocity) in this transparent
material.
The refractive index of water is 1.33, meaning that light travels 1.33 times as fast in a vacuum
than it does in water. The refractive index of air at atmospheric pressure and room temperature is
1.000293, so close to 1.0 that the difference is insignificant.

Snell’s Law
Light rays travel in straight lines through optical materials, but light rays bend when they pass
through a boundary between two different refractive index materials, such as from air into glass.
This phenomenon is called refraction.
for explaining propagation of light in an optical fiber, the Ray-Model of light shall be used. The
Ray-Model of light obeys the Snell’s laws.
Snell’s law states that the ratio of the sines of the angles of incidence θ1 and refraction θ2 is
equivalent to the ratio of light speed (velocities) in the two materials, or equivalent to the opposite
ratio of the refractive index of refraction.

Snell’s law is also written as:

n1sinθ1=n2sinθ2
Where
v = velocity (light speed in material)
n = refractive index
θ1 = angle of incidence
θ2 = angle of refraction
Following figure depicts a situation of a typical refraction phenomenon taking place at the
interface of two optically different media having refractive indices n1 and n2:

The angles measured in the expression for Snell’s law are measured with respect to the normal
to the media interface at the point of incidence. If n2 > n1 , then the angle of refraction is greater
than the angle of incidence and the refracted ray is said to have moved away from the normal. If
the angle of incidence (θ1) is increased further, the angle of refraction (θ2) also increases in
accordance with the Snell’s law and at a particular angle of incidence the angle of refraction
becomes 90o and the refracted ray grazes along the media interface. This angle of incidence is
called the critical angle of incidence (θc) of medium 2 with respect to medium 1. One should
note here that critical angle is media-relative. That means, the same optically denser medium
may have different critical angles with respect to different optically rarer media.