What is Fiber Attenuation

Over the last few decades, optical fiber has become the transmission medium of choice because it provides efficient high data rate transmission at low Bit Error Rate. The optical fiber has a potential capacity of terabits-per-second. Modern commercial transport systems are capable of operating at 10 Gb/s with experimental system clocking 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s performance. The present transport networks cannot sustain such a high data rate of terabits-per-second. The fiber dispersion, fiber nonlinearities and electronic switching used in present transport networks, are the main limiting factors. A new generation of optical networks known as ‘All-Optical-Networks (AONs)' overcomes this limitation by switching data entirely optically using Optical Switches. However AONs are prone to phenomena known as ‘node crosstalk'. This chapter discusses the propagation of light in optical fibers, linear as well as nonlinear impairments and the effects of dispersion & fiber nonlinearities on the system performance of crosstalk limited AONs.