In recent years, the importance of training skillful fiber optic engineers capable of designing and analyzing fiber optic links to deliver the enormous capacity needed for the next generation of mobile phones (5G) has been proven in industry. A comprehensive curriculum for such courses should undoubtedly comprise both theoretical and hands-on skills to better prepare the engineers before entering industry. The hands-on skills can be established through experimenting with real fiber optic links. However, having access to an equipped fiber optic laboratory imposes a significant cost to the academic institutions. Therefore, similar hands-on experiences can be delivered by software simulation of the physical signal generation and propagation. Thus, identifying an efficient yet powerful tool in simulating fiber optics components and devices is of utmost importance toward successfully rendering an understanding of the physical phenomena to the graduates. This paper aims to analyze the necessity of incorporating hands-on experience through software simulation and then it suggests the course topics and the learning outcomes expected to be achieved from this course. In addition, it investigates the feedbacks obtained from graduate engineering students throughout an actual course offered on fiber optic communication and demonstrates the assessment of the strength and weaknesses of the method. Finally, it introduces a powerful software package capable of simulating a variety of optical systems and devices frequently used in a typical fiber optic link and presents the performance analysis of this software package in addressing primitive and complex problems arising in fiber optics.
The design and performance evaluation of a W-band wavelength division multiplexed-over-optical code division multiple access radio-over-fiber system are presented. The system’s performance introduces expansion in the number of channels and bit rate per channel for millimeter wave signals by optically encoding signals in a multiwavelength transmission system. The performance of the system is verified based on software simulation of three channels that carry six users’ encoded data. The achieved results are measured in bit-error-rate and eye-diagram figures. The obtained results are analyzed for each wavelength channels and each code families used. Bit error rates of 10 − 2 to 10 − 6 are obtained for channels operating at 10 Gb / s.
KEYWORDS: Channel projecting optics, Radio optics, Extremely high frequency, Wave propagation, Wavelength division multiplexing, Radio propagation, Computer programming, Optical fibers, Signal generators, Signal attenuation
We propose a W-band wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)-over-optical code-division multiple access radio-over-fiber system. This system offers capacity expansion by increasing the working frequency to millimeter wave region and by introducing optical encoding and multiwavelength multiplexing. The system’s functionality is investigated by software modeling, and the results are presented. The generated signals are data modulated at 10 Gb/s and optically encoded for two wavelength channels and transmitted with a 20-km length of fiber. The received signals are optically decoded and detected. Also, encoding has improved the bit error rate (BER) versus the received optical power margin for the WDM setting by about 4 dB. In addition, the eye-diagram shows that the difference between received optical power levels at the BER of 10−12 to 10−3 is about 1.3% between two encoded channels. This method of capacity improvement is significantly important for the next generation of mobile communication, where millimeter wave signals will be widely used to deliver data to small cells.
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