Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled a prototype technology that could help pave the pay for the development of optical networks with Petabit-per-second transmission capacity.
The company's Bell Labs research arm has developed a real-time space-division multiplexed optical multiple-in-multiple out (MIMO-SDM) system.
The prototype technology was unveiled at the 2015 IEEE Photonics conference. It has been tested at Bell Labs' global headquarters in the US with a real-time experiment using six transmitters and six transceivers over 60km of coupled-mode fiber.
Bell Labs CTO Marcus Weldon said MIMO-SDM has the potential to push the limits of optical network capacity to meet the expected exponential growth in demand for traffic.
“This experiment represents a major breakthrough in the development of future optical transport. We are at the crossroads of a huge change in communications networks, with the advent of 5G and cloud networking underway,” he said.
“Operators and enterprises alike will see their networks challenged by massive increases in traffic. At Bell Labs we are continuously innovating to shape the future of communications networks to meet those demands.”
Alcatel-Lucent has asserted that MIMO-SDM has the potential to overcome the Shannon Limit, the theoretical maximum capacity of a communications channel before a signal is overcome by noise.