The Need

In today's growing telecommunication industry operation and maintenance of a network is one of the biggest challenges for IT professionals. Operating a telecommunication network requires managing a vast quantity of fiber optic cables and interconnected data hubs. Regular maintenance of these fiber optic cables, to ensure high quality of service, is a difficult and time consuming task. Part of regular maintenance is constantly monitoring cables to discern which cables need repair or replacement. Current cable error standards require a maximum error rate of a billion transferred bits to one error before the cable is declared faulty and in need of replacement. At transfer rates of 40 Gb/s about 40 minutes is needed to collect the data necessary to determine the status of a cable, during this time the cable must be taken out of service. The next advance in this field is to find a method that can monitor signal degradation, without having to take a cable offline.

The Market

Telecommunication is a constantly growing industry as world data transfers increase daily. Global optical communication has a predicted value of $500 million in 2019. With a average annual growth rate of 53.4% over the last five years. The photonics market is currently very heavily invested in research and is preparing to be a dominant market in the future as the need for photonics based devices increases. The predicted annual growth rate is 33.1% through 2017. Global markets for photonic components and modules have a predicted valuation of $20.4 billion in 2017.Markets

• Next Generation computers
• Data storage
• Academic research
• Fiber optic cables
• Telecommunication

The Technology

Dr. Anderson and her research team at The Ohio State University have developed a method for instantaneous monitoring of an optical link through the use of optical correlation.Dr. Anderson has conceived a method for quality of service motoring for fiber optic cables by optically correlating a stored signal with the same signal transferred over a cable. This method works on a timescale that is significantly faster than established methods, the time from receiving a signal to determining the signal quality is about 100 picoseconds. This method compares individual bits to determine the amount of degradation per bit instead of waiting for an error to occur, in total four bits are required to make a determination as to the quality of the cable. This significant reduction in the required time is a distinct advantage this technology has over other methods.