Light Transmission

Unguided optical signaling or free-space optics has been in use for centuries. Paul Revere used binary optical signaling from the Old North Church just prior to his famous ride. A more modern application is to connect the LANs in two buildings via lasers mounted on their rooftops. Optical signaling using lasers is inherently unidirectional, so each end needs its own laser and its own photodetector. This scheme offers very high bandwidth at very low cost and is relatively secure because it is difficult to tap a narrow laser beam. It is also relatively easy to install and, unlike microwave transmission, does not require an FCC license.

The laser’s strength, a very narrow beam, is also its weakness here. Aiming a laser beam 1 mm wide at a target the size of a pin head 500 meters away requires the marksmanship of a latter-day Annie Oakley. Usually, lenses are put into the system to defocus the beam slightly. To add to the difficulty, wind and temperature changes can distort the beam and laser beams also cannot penetrate rain or thick fog, although they normally work well on sunny days. However, many of these factors are not an issue when the use is to connect two spacecraft.

One of the authors (AST) once attended a conference at a modern hotel in Europe at which the conference organizers thoughtfully provided a room full of terminals to allow the attendees to read their email during boring presentations. Since the local PTT was unwilling to install a large number of telephone lines for just 3 days, the organizers put a laser on the roof and aimed it at their university’s computer science building a few kilometers away. They tested it the night before the conference and it worked perfectly. At 9 A.M. on a bright, sunny day, the link failed completely and stayed down all day. The pattern repeated itself the next two days. It was not until after the conference that the organizers discovered the problem: heat from the sun during the daytime caused convection currents to rise up from the roof of the building, as shown in figure. This turbulent air diverted the beam and made it dance around the detector, much like a shimmering road on a hot day. The lesson here is that to work well in difficult conditions as well as good conditions, unguided optical links need to be engineered with a sufficient margin of error.

Unguided optical communication may seem like an exotic networking technology today, but it might soon become much more prevalent. We are surrounded by cameras (that sense light) and displays (that emit light using LEDs and other technology). Data communication can be layered on top of these displays by encoding information in the pattern at which LEDs turn on and off that is below the threshold of human perception. Communicating with visible light in this way is inherently safe and creates a low-speed network in the immediate vicinity of the display. This could enable all sorts of fanciful ubiquitous computing scenarios. The flashing lights on emergency vehicles might alert nearby traffic lights and vehicles to help clear a path. Informational signs might broadcast maps. Even festive lights might broadcast songs that are synchronized with their display.

Infrared Transmission

Unguided infrared waves are widely used for short-range communication. The remote controls used for televisions, VCRs, and stereos all use infrared communication. They are relatively directional, cheap, and easy to build but have a major drawback: they do not pass through solid objects. (Try standing between your remote control and your television and see if it still works.) In general, as we go from long-wave radio toward visible light, the waves behave more and more like light and less and less like radio.

On the other hand, the fact that infrared waves do not pass through solid walls well is also a plus. It means that an infrared system in one room of a building will not interfere with a similar system in adjacent rooms or buildings: you cannot control your neighbor’s television with your remote control. Furthermore, security of infrared systems against eavesdropping is better than that of radio systems precisely for this reason. Therefore, no government license is needed to operate an infrared system, in contrast to radio systems, which must be licensed outside the ISM bands. Infrared communication has a limited use on the desktop, for example, to connect notebook computers and printers with the IrDA (Infrared Data Association) standard, but it is not a major player in the communication game.

Microwave Transmission

Above 100 MHz, the waves travel in nearly straight lines and can therefore be narrowly focused. Concentrating all the energy into a small beam by means of a parabolic antenna (like the familiar satellite TV dish) gives a much higher signalto-noise ratio, but the transmitting and receiving antennas must be accurately aligned with each other. In addition, this directionality allows multiple transmitters lined up in a row to communicate with multiple receivers in a row without interference, provided some minimum spacing rules are observed. Before fiber optics, for decades these microwaves formed the heart of the long-distance telephone transmission system. In fact, MCI, one of AT&T’s first competitors after it was deregulated, built its entire system with microwave communications passing between towers tens of kilometers apart. Even the company’s name reflected this (MCI stood for Microwave Communications, Inc.). MCI has since gone over to fiber and through a long series of corporate mergers and bankruptcies in the telecommunications shuffle has become part of Verizon.

Microwaves travel in a straight line, so if the towers are too far apart, the earth will get in the way (think about a Seattle-to-Amsterdam link). Thus, repeaters are needed periodically. The higher the towers are, the farther apart they can be. The distance between repeaters goes up very roughly with the square root of the tower height. For 100-meter-high towers, repeaters can be 80 km apart.

Unlike radio waves at lower frequencies, microwaves do not pass through buildings well. In addition, even though the beam may be well focused at the transmitter, there is still some divergence in space. Some waves may be refracted off low-lying atmospheric layers and may take slightly longer to arrive than the direct waves. The delayed waves may arrive out of phase with the direct wave and thus cancel the signal. This effect is called multipath fading and is often a serious problem. It is weather and frequency dependent. Some operators keep 10% of their channels idle as spares to switch on when multipath fading temporarily wipes out some frequency band.

The demand for more and more spectrum drives operators to yet higher frequencies. Bands up to 10 GHz are now in routine use, but at about 4 GHz a new problem sets in: absorption by water. These waves are only a few centimeters long and are absorbed by rain. This effect would be fine if one were planning to build a huge outdoor microwave oven for roasting passing birds, but for communication it is a severe problem. As with multipath fading, the only solution is to shut off links that are being rained on and route around them.

In summary, microwave communication is so widely used for long-distance telephone communication, mobile phones, television distribution, and other purposes that a severe shortage of spectrum has developed. It has several key advantages over fiber. The main one is that no right of way is needed to lay down cables. By buying a small plot of ground every 50 km and putting a microwave tower on it, one can bypass the telephone system entirely. This is how MCI managed to get started as a new long-distance telephone company so quickly. (Sprint, another early competitor to the deregulated AT&T, went a completely different route: it was formed by the Southern Pacific Railroad, which already owned a large amount of right of way and just buried fiber next to the tracks.)

Microwave is also relatively inexpensive. Putting up two simple towers (which can be just big poles with four guy wires) and putting antennas on each one may be cheaper than burying 50 km of fiber through a congested urban area or up over a mountain, and it may also be cheaper than leasing the telephone company’s fiber, especially if the telephone company has not yet even fully paid for the copper it ripped out when it put in the fiber.

Radio Transmission

Radio frequency (RF) waves are easy to generate, can travel long distances, and can penetrate buildings easily, so they are widely used for communication, both indoors and outdoors. Radio waves also are omnidirectional, meaning that they travel in all directions from the source, so the transmitter and receiver do not have to be carefully aligned physically.

Sometimes omnidirectional radio is good, but sometimes it is bad. In the 1970s, General Motors decided to equip all its new Cadillacs with computer-controlled antilock brakes. When the driver stepped on the brake pedal, the computer pulsed the brakes on and off instead of locking them on hard. One fine day an Ohio Highway Patrolman began using his new mobile radio to call headquarters, and suddenly the Cadillac next to him began behaving like a bucking bronco. When the officer pulled the car over, the driver claimed that he had done nothing and that the car had gone crazy.

Eventually, a pattern began to emerge: Cadillacs would sometimes go berserk, but only on major highways in Ohio and then only when the Highway Patrol was watching. For a long, long time General Motors could not understand why Cadillacs worked fine in all the other states and also on minor roads in Ohio. Only after much searching did they discover that the Cadillac’s wiring made a fine antenna for the frequency used by the Ohio Highway Patrol’s new radio system.

The properties of radio waves are frequency dependent. At low frequencies, radio waves pass through obstacles well, but the power falls off sharply with distance from the source—at least as fast as 1/r 2 in air—as the signal energy is spread more thinly over a larger surface. This attenuation is called path loss. At high frequencies, radio waves tend to travel in straight lines and bounce off obstacles. Path loss still reduces power, though the received signal can depend strongly on reflections as well. High-frequency radio waves are also absorbed by rain and other obstacles to a larger extent than are low-frequency ones. At all frequencies, radio waves are subject to interference from motors and other electrical equipment.

It is interesting to compare the attenuation of radio waves to that of signals in guided media. With fiber, coax and twisted pair, the signal drops by the same fraction per unit distance, for example 20 dB per 100m for twisted pair. With radio, the signal drops by the same fraction as the distance doubles, for example 6 dB per doubling in free space. This behavior means that radio waves can travel long distances, and interference between users is a problem. For this reason, all governments tightly regulate the use of radio transmitters, with few notable exceptions.

In the VLF, LF, and MF bands, radio waves follow the ground,in Figure(a). These waves can be detected for perhaps 1000 km at the lower frequencies, less at the higher ones. AM radio broadcasting uses the MF band, which is why the ground waves from Boston AM radio stations cannot be heard easily in New York. Radio waves in these bands pass through buildings easily, which is why portable radios work indoors.

In the HF and VHF bands, the ground waves tend to be absorbed by the earth. However, the waves that reach the ionosphere, a layer of charged particles circling the earth at a height of 100 to 500 km, are refracted by it and sent back to earth, as shown in Figure(b). Under certain atmospheric conditions, the signals can bounce several times. Amateur radio operators (hams) use these bands to talk long distance. The military also communicate in the HF and VHF bands.

Transmission of Light Through Fiber

Optical fibers are made of glass, which, in turn, is made from sand, an inexpensive raw material available in unlimited amounts. Glassmaking was known to the ancient Egyptians, but their glass had to be no more than 1 mm thick or the light could not shine through. Glass transparent enough to be useful for windows was developed during the Renaissance. The glass used for modern optical fibers is so transparent that if the oceans were full of it instead of water, the seabed would be as visible from the surface as the ground is from an airplane on a clear day.

The attenuation of light through glass depends on the wavelength of the light (as well as on some physical properties of the glass). It is defined as the ratio of input to output signal power. For the kind of glass used in fibers, the attenuation is shown in below figure in units of decibels per linear kilometer of fiber. For example, a factor of two loss of signal power gives an attenuation of 10 log10 2 = 3 dB. The figure shows the near-infrared part of the spectrum, which is what is used in practice. Visible light has slightly shorter wavelengths, from 0.4 to 0.7 microns. (1 micron is 10−6 meters.) The true metric purist would refer to these wavelengths as 400 nm to 700 nm, but we will stick with traditional usage.

Three wavelength bands are most commonly used at present for optical communication. They are centered at 0.85, 1.30, and 1.55 microns, respectively. All three bands are 25,000 to 30,000 GHz wide. The 0.85-micron band was used first. It has higher attenuation and so is used for shorter distances, but at that wavelength the lasers and electronics could be made from the same material (gallium arsenide). The last two bands have good attenuation properties (less than 5% loss per kilometer). The 1.55-micron band is now widely used with erbium-doped amplifiers that work directly in the optical domain.

Light pulses sent down a fiber spread out in length as they propagate. This spreading is called chromatic dispersion. The amount of it is wavelength dependent. One way to keep these spread-out pulses from overlapping is to increase the distance between them, but this can be done only by reducing the signaling rate. Fortunately, it has been discovered that making the pulses in a special shape related to the reciprocal of the hyperbolic cosine causes nearly all the dispersion effects cancel out, so it is possible to send pulses for thousands of kilometers without appreciable shape distortion. These pulses are called solitons. A considerable amount of research is going on to take solitons out of the lab and into the field.

Fourier Analysis

In the early 19th century, the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier proved that any reasonably behaved periodic function, g(t) with period T, can be constructed as the sum of a (possibly infinite) number of sines and cosines:

where f = 1/T is the fundamental frequency, an and bn are the sine and cosine amplitudes  of the nth harmonics (terms), and c is a constant. Such a decomposition is called a Fourier series.From the Fourier series, the function can be reconstructed. That is, if the period, T, is known and the amplitudes are given, the original function of time can be found by performing the sums of First Eq.

A data signal that has a finite duration, which all of them do, can be handled by just imagining that it repeats the entire pattern over and over forever (i.e., the interval from T to 2T is the same as from 0 to T, etc.).

The an amplitudes can be computed for any given g(t) by multiplying both sides of First Eq. by sin(2πkft) and then integrating from 0 to T. Since

only one term of the summation survives: an. The bn summation vanishes completely. Similarly, by multiplying First Eq. by cos(2πkft) and integrating between 0 and T, we can derive bn. By just integrating both sides of the equation as it stands, we can find c. The results of performing these operations are as follows:

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