Lightwave Systems The preceding three chapters focused on the three main components of a fiber-optic communication system—optical fibers, optical transmitters, and optical receivers. In this chapter we consider the issues related to system design and performance when the three components are put together to form a practical lightwave system. Section provides an overview of various system architectures. The design guidelines for fiberoptic communication systems are discussed in Section by considering the effects of fiber losses and group-velocity dispersion. The power and the rise-time budgets are also described in this section. Section focuses on long-haul systems for which the. | Fiber-Optic Communications Systems Third Edition. Govind P. Agrawal Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Inc. ISBNs 0-471-21571-6 Hardback 0-471-22114-7 Electronic Chapter 5 Lightwave Systems The preceding three chapters focused on the three main components of a fiber-optic communication system optical fibers optical transmitters and optical receivers. In this chapter we consider the issues related to system design and performance when the three components are put together to form a practical lightwave system. Section provides an overview of various system architectures. The design guidelines for fiberoptic communication systems are discussed in Section by considering the effects of fiber losses and group-velocity dispersion. The power and the rise-time budgets are also described in this section. Section focuses on long-haul systems for which the nonlinear effects become quite important. This section also covers various terrestrial and undersea lightwave systems that have been developed since 1977 when the first field trial was completed in Chicago. Issues related to system performance are treated in Section with emphasis on performance degradation occurring as a result of signal transmission through the optical fiber. The physical mechanisms that can lead to power penalty in actual lightwave systems include modal noise mode-partition noise source spectral width frequency chirp and reflection feedback each of them is discussed in separate subsections. In Section we emphasize the importance of computer-aided design for lightwave systems. System Architectures From an architectural standpoint fiber-optic communication systems can be classified into three broad categories point-to-point links distribution networks and local-area networks 1 - 7 . This section focuses on the main characteristics of these three system architectures. Point-to-Point Links Point-to-point links constitute the simplest kind of lightwave systems. Their role is to .
