Bit Error Rate Analysis of Optical Switch Buffer in Presence of Dispersion and Optical Amplifier Noise

Abstract

In modern data centers, recently optical interconnects are heavily deployed to manage the performance bottlenecks, owing to the inherent nature to support large-scale bandwidth at low-latencies. Due to this, optical communication has gained popularity in recent studies. However, at the physical layer, information bits are transferred through optical signals that use very narrow Gaussian pulses, normally generated by a mode lock laser. As these pulses propagate in the optical fiber, the generated power of the pulses deteriorates and thus the detrimental effect of pulse broadening takes place. Due to this, inter-symbol interference occurs at the physical layer, which results in high information loss at different data-center applications. To address the mentioned limitation, dispersion compensated fibers can be used to narrow the pulse broadening via wide Gaussian vectors. Thus, to address the challenges, the paper proposes a scheme to compensate for the detrimental effect of dispersion and amplifier noise on fiber delay lines based on the optical buffer. In simulations, it has been found that buffer fiber length cannot be ignored (as done in past studies) for power budget analysis. It is also found that buffer design is a complex problem, and successful buffer implementation depends on the number of bits stored bit rate, and dispersion, and losses of the buffer.