UNLOC is going to the largest fibre communications conference

17 March, 2016

Every year, the global community of optical communications and networking experts from academia and the industry convene in sunny California for the Optical Fiber Communications conference. UNLOC will be there to present and share latest research results and join in the discussion about the future of optical communications. 

It will soon be this time of the year, when the UNLOC offices and labs in London become a bit quieter while most members of the team attend the largest and indisputably leading conference on optical fibre communications. For the last 40 years, the Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC) has been the venue where optical communications professionals and academics from across the world meet to share ideas and discuss latest developments, network and find partners for new collaborations. The UNLOC group never misses this opportunity and for the 2016 edition of the conference, our researchers will present their work in multiple technical sessions spanning a broad spectrum of topics from information theory and simulations to experimental results, component and system design. UNLOC investigators Seb Savory (Cambridge University) and Andrew Ellis (Aston University), and postdoctoral fellow Robert Maher are among the list of invited speakers, while another research fellow, Domanic Lavery will chair the last contributed session of the conference “Metro-Access Convergence” on Thursday, March 24. Robert Maher was also invited in the panel of Is Nonlinearity Mitigation Commercially Viable - If so will it be DSP or Optics Based? workshop where leading experts in the world will debate the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two main approaches (electronic and optical) to dealing with nonlinearity in fibre cables, currently the main limiting factor in expanding the capacity of optical communications systems.

Invited talks to be presented at OFC 2016

Probabilistic Design of Nonlinear Optical Transmission Systems
Seb Savory

Algorithms and Reach Enhancement for Ultra High Bandwidth Transceivers
R. Maher, L. Galdino, D.J. Elson, D. Lavery, A. Alvarado and P. Bayvel

Impact of Optical Phase Conjugation on the Nonlinear Shannon Limit
A.D. Ellis, M.A.Z. Al Khateeb, and M.E. McCarthy

Accepted papers to be presented during OFC 2016 technical sessions

Impact of Amplifier Noise Figure on Network Throughput
Alex Alvarado, David J. Ives, Seb J. Savory and Polina Bayvel

First Experimental Demonstration of Nonlinear Inverse Synthesis Transmission over Transoceanic Distances
S. T. Le, I. D. Philips, J. E. Prilepsky, P. Harper, N. J. Doran, A. D. Ellis, and S. K. Turitsyn

Simplified DSP-Based Signal-Signal Beat Interference Mitigation for Direct-Detection Subcarrier Modulation
Z. Li, M.S. Erkılınç, R. Bouziane, R. Maher, L. Galdino, K. Shi, B.C. Thomsen, P. Bayvel, and R.I. Killey

Simplified Impulse Response Characterization for Mode Division Multiplexed Systems
Kai Shi, Ariel Gomez, Pranabesh Barua, Xianqing Jin, Jayanta Sahu, Yongmin Jung, Qiongyue Kang, Benn C. Thomsen, Crisanto Quintana, Shaif-Ul Alam

Improved Achievable Information Rates by Optimized Four-Dimensional Demappers in Optical Transmission Experiments
Tobias Fehenberger, Tobias A. Eriksson, Alex Alvarado, Magnus Karlsson, Erik Agrell, and Norbert Hanik

Predicting the Performance of Nonbinary Forward Error Correction in Optical Transmission Experiments
Laurent Schmalen, Alex Alvarado, and Rafael Rios-Muller

Posters to be presented at OFC 2016

A Low Complexity Hybrid Time-Frequency Domain Adaptive Equalizer for Coherent Optical Receivers
Md. Saifuddin Faruk, Domaniç Lavery, Robert Maher, and Seb J. Savory

High Port Count Hybrid Wavelength Switched TDMA (WS-TDMA) Optical Switch for Data Centers*
Adam Funnell, Joshua Benjamin, Hitesh Ballani, Paolo Costa, Philip Watts, Benn C. Thomsen

*Adam Funnel is a PhD student in the Optical Networks Group. The work he will present at the OFC 2016 is closely related to the research themes of UNLOC, but it was not supported by UNLOC grant.

Image: UNLOC PI, Seb Savory and his colleague who jointly served as general chairs of OFC 2015.