High-speed optical networking with ethernet

The main focus of this thesis is establishing high-speed connectivity of workstations over optical fiber. The networking of these workstations is carried out by transmission of'Fast Ethernet' data at 100 Mbps. There are commercially available fiber transceivers that provide high fi-equency Ethernet connectivity at 100 Mbps, but this is discouraging from the viewpoint of the very high costs involved.

The research carried out towards this thesis promises not only a technically workable high-speed fiber optic communications network but also an economically viable solution that can be implemented over the entire university campus. The lasers and photoreceivers used in the experiments are capable of handling very high frequency digital signals. This assures reliability of the fiber network at very high speeds. A design to implement the networking of eight departments of the university using WDM(Wavelength Division Multiplexing) is discussed. This is supported by a mathematical model that simulates the performance of the network in terms of delay and throughput. Further experiments have been performed to achieve a four-wavelength WDM network over 6.2 km of single mode fiber at a data rate of 2.5 Gb/s. This simulates high-speed Ethernet fiber optic transmission at 2.5 Gb/s which is an OC-48 SONET standard.