Comparative analysis, design and optimisation of a 48 channel DWDM system using various design parameters

Abstract

In the current era, there is an ever-growing demand for data hungry applications and services that need large amounts of bandwidth to send digital information at very high speeds. In order to meet this challenge for higher bandwidth capacity, Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is used as the strategy to transmit multiple high-bit rate channels at extremely narrow channel spacings over a single fiber core. However, this gives rise to detrimental transmission impairments such as linear effects and non-linear effects. The dissertation minimises the impairments by optimally designing a new DWDM system that produces a detectable and acceptable quality of signal at the receiver. In this dissertation, a comparative analysis is performed on the simulative design of a 48-channel DWDM system that has a 25 Gb/s bit rate and a 100 km transmission distance. The research mitigates the effects of transmission impairments such that an error-free matched communication link is produced for equally spaced (ES) channels of 100 GHz, 50 GHz, 25 GHZ and 12.5 GHz and 6.25 GHz. Various design parameters are used to create the comparative analysis model to optimise the 48 channel DWDM network. The design is simulated using the Optisystem simulation platform and the signal analysis is based on the bit error rate (BER) and quality (Q) factor of the received signal’s eye diagrams. It is established in the desertion that modified networks with matched active components has ES frequency channels that are aligned to each other and has a higher optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) than mismatched networks. The maximum signal power and OSNR of the 3-erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)-post symmetric compensation technique is always higher than the 1-EDFA post compensation technique for all channel spacings in any type of network. Modified duobinary return to zero (MDRZ) when compared to non-return to zero (NRZ) and return to zero (RZ) has a greater dispersion tolerance, higher fiber non-linearity tolerance and a higher acceptable signal transmission over longer distances with the least amount of errors. The optimised design parameter configurations produce the highest signal performance (highest Q factor > 6 and lowest BER > 10-9) and the highest bandwidth efficiency for the RZ Modulation (at 100 GHz, 50 GHz and 25 GHz channel spacings) and MDRZ Modulation (at 12.5 and 6.25 GHz channel spacing).