Optical Transport: LambdaDriver® — MRV Optical Communications Systems®

LambdaDriver® — Optical Transport

Multifunction Transponders

In a WDM network, multiple light wavelengths are transported in parallel increasing the total transport capacity and increases the efficiency of fiber. Transponders provide a necessary conversion or translation between these network facing wavelengths and the customer premise equipment, which is typically equipped with low-cost local interfaces (copper or fiber). In addition to the basic wavelength conversion, transponders offer a suite of features that aid in the management, provisioning and upkeep WDM systems.

Most transponders provide a level of signal processing to counter some of the degrading effects of fiber and intermediate components associated with an optical transport system. In order to faithfully reproduce a high speed data signal, transponder also perform a "3R" function (reshape, retime, retransmit) to eliminate jitter and distortion. In high speed (10 Gigabit) scenarios the use of additional error correction technologies are used to maintain optimum optical budgets and high bit-error rates. Select transponders also possess the ability to further reduce the non-linear effect of fiber by including integrated dispersion compensation. Long distance networks can be deployed without expensive external dispersion compensation modules.

At the optical level, transponders can feature internal integrated lasers and receivers, or be characterized with pluggable transceivers. WDM network facing characterization can be accomplished with a wide range of channelized transceivers designed to interface direct to a WDM network. Recent growth in popular 10G transport has resulted in the development of the tunable transponder which can be programmed to any WDM network channel, making this a key component to emerging ROADM networks.