Bell Labs Reports First Transmission of 100-Gb/s Ethernet Over Optical

MURRAY HILL, N.J., Oct. 3 -- Bell Labs, the research and development division of Lucent Technologies, announced the first reported transmissions of 100-Gb/s Ethernet over optical, widely considered a significant milestone in the industry's move toward migrating to 100-Gb/s data networking, in two papers presented to the European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication in Scotland.

"This work is a major first. We have broken through the ceiling in transmission rates and described two techniques that could help implement 100-G Ethernet over optical systems," said Bell Labs Director Martin Zirngibl. "With more and more enterprises moving to 10-Gb/s transmission, carriers are looking to implement 100-Gb/s Ethernet in the metro area network as a way to efficiently multiplex and transmit high amounts of data in its native Ethernet format."

Currently, Ethernet signals are transported over 10 Gb/s and, occasionally, over 40-Gb/s SONET connections. This Bell Labs work is aimed at producing 100-Gb/s Ethernet over optical transmission. The Bell Labs research team was able to deliver a 107-Gb/s optical data stream, representing 100 Gb/s of data transmission plus a standard 7 percent overhead for error correction, using duobinary signaling, which require less bandwidth than traditional NRZ (non-return to zero) signals and enabled the creation of an optical 107-Gb/s serial data stream using a commercially available optical modulator (rated for 40 Gb/s), and a single-chip optical equalizer, which compensated for almost all intersymbol interference arising from modulator bandwidth limitations in an optical 107-Gb/s NRZ electronic time division multiplexing transmitter. As with the duobinary approach, Bell Labs researchers used a commercially available 40-Gb/s optical modulator in combination with the optical equalizer to generate a 107-Gb/s optical NRZ data stream.

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