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LYT-GUEST EDIT-Theodoras

10/19/09

12:22 PM

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SERIES EDITORIAL

OPTICAL COMMUNICATIONS

Hideo Kuwahara

I

Jim Theodoras

n the past few months of this year, there have been some notable events related to optical communications: OECC 2009 on July 13–17 in Hong Kong, CLEO Pacific Rim 2009 on August 30-September 3 in Shanghai, and ECOC 2009 on September 20–24 in Vienna. OECC in Hong Kong was a well organized successful event gathering 500 attendees in spite of the influences of financial recession and swine flu. For the details on OECC 2009, please refer to the conference report in this issue by General Chair Prof. Ping-kong Alex Wai. The first CLEO Pacific Rim was held in Shanghai, China, gathering over 800 participants. It was an impressive four-day event, attracting many young Chinese researchers in the field, and featured very enthusiastic discussion across eight parallel sessions. The big tide of the market in the Shanghai area made a big impression, and the big economic and social evolution was apparent, including preparation for World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. Another big event was ECOC 2009 in Vienna, Austria, gathering more than 1000 attendees for the conference, as well as 288 exhibitors and nearly 4000 visitors for the exhibition. In the plenary session of ECOC 2009, George Gilder, famous for authoring “Telecosm” and Gilder's Law, explained in his talk titled “The Rise of Exaflood Optics” how the total traffic is exploding due to the 100 exabytes (10 to the 18th, a billion gigabytes) of data swarming around worldwide Webs of glass and light. Andy Chraplyvy of Alcatel-Lucent summarized, in his plenary talk titled “The Coming Capacity Crunch,” the technology of optical coherent transmission in a very comprehensive manner, comparing preceding wireless technologies with upcoming digital signal processing (DSP)-based optical coherent transmission technologies. In this issue we have five articles. The first three are series papers on next-generation access or passive optical networking (PON). The first one, “Next-Generation PON — Part I: Technology Roadmap and General Requirements” by J. Kani et al., describes the standardized gigabit PON and its migration scenario toward the next-generation access system, and proposes a technology roadmap of evolutionary growth (NGPON1) vs. revolutionary change (NG-PON2). The next article, “Next-Gen PON — Part II:Candidate Systems for Next-Generation PON” by F. Effenberger et al., explains the architec-

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ture of the system, several different system configurations, their challenges and advantages, the perspective of likely standardization, and key requirements of coexistence. The third article, “Next-Generation PON — Part III: System Specifications for XG-PON” by F. Effenberger et al., describes the current thinking on XG-PON (10G PON) as the preferred next generation optical access system, with its technical specifications the basis for standardization in an upcoming ITU-T Recommendation, including system design for the wavelength plan, power budget, protocol, and management and service model. These three articles were written by the leaders of NGPON standardization activities and serve as a common guideline in this field of technology. The fourth article in this issue is “Spectrum-Efficient and Scalable Elastic Optical Path Network: Architecture, Benefits, and Enabling Technologies” by M. Jinno et al. To prepare for sustaining growth of data traffic, and the introduction of an efficient and scalable transport platform for links of 100 Gb/s and beyond, this article proposes a novel spectrum-efficient and scalable optical transport network architecture called the spectrum-sliced elastic optical path network (SLICE), which enables sub-wavelength, superwavelength, and multirate data traffic accommodation in a highly spectrum-efficient manner. This kind of discussion has always been mainstream in the development of optical transmission technologies, and will be a good milestone for the next step forward. The fifth article, “Practical Physical-Layer Encryption: The Marriage of Optical Noice with Traditional Cryptography” by Kanter et al., describes an emerging method of encryption suitable for high-speed optical networks, combining a traditional electronic cryptographic algorithm and the physical effect of optical noise of quantum origin.

BIOGRAPHIES HIDEO KUWAHARA [F] ([email protected]) joined Fujitsu in 1974, and has been engaged for more than 30 years in R&D of optical communications technologies, including high-speed TDM systems, coherent optical transmission systems, EDFA, terrestrial and submarine WDM systems, and related optical components. His current responsibility is to lead photonics technology as a Fellow of Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. in Japan. He stayed in the United States from 2000 to 2003 as a senior vice president at Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc., and Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Richardson, Texas. He belongs to LEOS and ComSoc. He is a co-Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine’s Optical Communications Series. He is currently a member of the International Advisory Committee of the European Conference on Optical Communications, and chairs the Steering Committee of CLEO Pacific Rim. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communications Engineers (IEICE) of Japan. He has co-chaired several conferences, including Optoelectronics and Communications Conference (OECC) 2007. He received an Achievement Award from IEICE of Japan in 1998 for the experimental realization of optical terabit transmission. He received the Sakurai Memorial Award from the Optoelectronic Industry and Technology Development Association of Japan in 1990 for research on coherent optical communication. JIM THEODORAS ([email protected]) is currently director of technical marketing at ADVA Optical Networking, working on Optical + Ethernet transport products. He has over 20 years of industry experience in optical communication, spanning a wide range of diverse topics. Prior to ADVA, he was a senior hardware manager and technical leader at Cisco Systems, where he managed Ethernet switch development on the Catalyst series product. At Cisco, he also worked on optical multiservice, switching, and transport products and related technologies such as MEMs, electronic compensation, forward error correction, and alternative modulation formats, and was fortunate enough to participate in the “pluggable optics” revolution. Prior to acquisition by Cisco, he worked at Monterey Networks, responsible for optics and 10G hardware development. He also worked at Alcatel Networks during the buildup to the telecom bubble on DWDM long-haul transport systems. Prior to DWDM and EDFAs, he worked at Clarostat on sensors and controls, IMRA America on a wide range of research topics from automotive LIDAR to femtosecond fiber lasers, and Texas Instruments on a variety of military electro-optical programs. He earned an M.S.E.E from the University of Texas at Dallas and a B.S.E.E. from the University of Dayton. He has 15 patents granted or pending.

IEEE Communications Magazine • November 2009