100 CHANNEL OPTICAL FDM TECHNOLOGY AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO OPTICAL FDM CHANNEL-BASED NETWORKS

Optical frequency division multiplexing (optical FDM), which allows the use of an extremely broad lightwave bandwidth, 10 000-200 000 GHz and over, can realize novel transport systems that could replace the current digital (time division multiplexing based) transport networks. This paper describes the optical FDM technology and the future perspectives of communication networks based on optical FDM technology. Starting from the technical results obtained from a 100 channel optical FDM experiment, the new concept of an optical FDM channel is proposed and a viable architecture for optical FDM channel-based networks is developed.