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Well aware that 20-year technology extrapolations are inherently noisy, we hope that taking a significantly longer-term view than most texts in this field will provide the reader with a broader perspective and will encourage the much needed out-of-the-box thinking to solve the very significant technology scaling problems ahead of us. Fitting for the occasion of the 20-year anniversary of Optics Express, we note that the number of pages published in this on-line only journal has grown by an equally impressive factor of 37, with ~900 pages published per year in its beginnings, and ~34,000 pages published annually today.Īdopting a 20-year view, we will review the evolution of optical fiber communication systems in this paper, and through a look at the previous 20 years attempt to extrapolate fiber-optic technology needs and potential solution paths for the coming 20 years. These numbers reflect enormous growth in the demand for data traffic and its supply through information and communications technologies, on well understood long-term exponential scaling trends, as we shall discuss in this paper. Over the previous 20 years, since Optics Express was created in 1997, Internet Protocol (IP) traffic in North America has grown by a factor of 10,000 the capacity of IP router blades, which make sure that these packets reach their destination host, has grown by a factor of 1,000 the capacity of wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) fiber-optic communication systems transporting the IP traffic across the globe has grown by the same factor of 1,000 and per-wavelength transponder interface rates have grown by a factor of between 10 and 100. © 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement 1.
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Focusing on the optical transport and switching layer, we cover aspects of large-scale spatial multiplexing, massive opto-electronic arrays and holistic optics-electronics-DSP integration, as well as optical node architectures for switching and multiplexing of spatial and spectral superchannels. Well aware that 20-year extrapolations are inherently associated with great uncertainties, we still hope that taking a significantly longer-term view than most texts in this field will provide the reader with a broader perspective and will encourage the much needed out-of-the-box thinking to solve the very significant technology scaling problems ahead of us.
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