Assessing optical network performance
Quality access to mobile networks requires line-of-sight as far as radio linkage is concerned. With interference coming from natural phenomena such as heavy rainfalls or even from building constructions such as airports, this quality can be somewhat impaired and access to networks limited. The IST based project OBANET established the wherewithal whereby area coverage management strategies and their related technologies could be assessed, proposed and ultimately implemented. The related technologies OBANET was concerned with comprised of High-performance optoelectronic devices and photonic integrated circuits composing the optical beamformers. Photonic signal processing provides many attractions as an exploitable solution to overcome current limitations; it has low loss and size, a high dynamic range and has an extremely huge bandwidth. However, some of the challenges facing developers include electrical phase noise or wavelength instability, and time delay errors caused by noise. This situation has resulted in the need to assess the performance of Wavelength Division Multiplexing as the foundation for implementing optical beamforming networks. This includes photonic microwave filters and general optical signal processing functionalities. As a result, a thorough noise model was developed as part of OBANET's efforts to accurately predict/assess performance of optical beamforming network components. The model can be applied to the design of photonic beam-forming networks, microwave filters and other optical processing structures. It further helps to address coverage management strategies as well as spectrum sharing in order to overcome the service unavailability problems, natural and man-made obstacles introduce. Such model constructs could be of particular importance to industrial manufacturers of fixed and mobile broadband access devices as well as the military.
