High-speed and high-capacity optical transmission systems

Over the past 50 years, digital communication technologies of various sorts have transformed our society into a true communication and information so- ciety. In many countries of the world, the vast majority of people today has access to a wealth of global and constantly updated information resources from their personal computers as well as from their handheld wireless devices. These technological advances have profoundly shaped many of our society's behavioral patterns, especially in the entertainment, commerce, and commu- nication/information sectors. Today, data traffic is dominated by a plethora of video applications, as illustrated in Frig 1(a) [1]. As a further communi- cations paradigm, currently still in its infancy, millions of end users will be sending rich, video-centric, and real-time contact between one another from wherever they are, and future corporate and personal communicatiuon products will evolve to include telepresence as their next frontier [2]. This step will sig- nificantly shape the long-distance travel patterns of our society, especially in times of limited global energy resources. Given all these developments, there is no reason to believe that the growth of data traffic should suddenly slow down from its long-term historic rate of between 1 and 2 'dB per year' (i.e., a factor of 10 every 5 to 10 years), as visualized for the example of Japanese internet exchange points in Fig. 1(b).