100 CHANNEL OPTICAL FDM TECHNOLOGY AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO OPTICAL FDM CHANNEL-BASED NETWORKS

Optical frequency division multiplexing (optical FDM), which allows th e use of an extremely broad lightwave bandwidth, 10 000-200 000 GHz an d over, can realize novel transport systems that could replace the cur rent digital (time division multiplexing based) transport networks. Th is paper describes the optical FDM technology and the future perspecti ves of communication networks based on optical FDM technology. Startin g from the technical results obtained from a 100 channel optical FDM e xperiment, the new concept of an optical FDM channel is proposed and a viable architecture for optical FDM channel-based networks is develop ed.