Clever signal encoding for telecommunication

Modern communication networks use optical fibres for data transmission. Each fibre can carry a number of signal channels at the same time. This means, for example, multiple phone calls can run through the same fibre in parallel without interfering with each other. If we find ways to increase the number of channels per fibre, we can increase the overall capacity of the existing fibre network.

The number of signal channels per fibre depends on the type of signal encoding that is used. For example, different channels can have different colours of light. In this way, we open up an extra channel with each additional colour. In reality, the exponentially growing demand in telecommunication exhausts the colour spectrum very quickly. The fall back options are either the installation of more optical fibres or new encoding techniques.

Lukas Novotny and Shawn Divitt developed an encoding method, where the number of signal channels increases not linearly but quadratically with the number of available fibres. Their method creates additional channels by correlating signals between pairs of fibres. The researchers successfully carried out a proof-of-principle experiment in their laboratory.

The researchers seek to enter into dialog with interested parties from industry. Also, licensing of the technology is possible.