Field trial of 107-Gb/s channel carrying live video traffic over 504 km in-service DWDM route

Abstract

A 107-Gbps field trial carrying live HDTV traffic over a 504-km in-service DWDM route, proving commercial systems designed for 10G/40G can be upgraded to 100G without impacting existing active channels.

Full text

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Field Trial of 107-Gb/s Channel Carrying Live Video Traffic
over 504 km In-Service DWDM Route

G. Wellbrock, T. J. Xia, W. Lee, G. Lyons, P. Hofmann, T. Fisk, B. Basch, W. Kluge, and J. Gatewood
Verizon, 2400 N. Glenville Drive, Richardson, Texas 75082, USA.
Email: glenn.wellbrock@verizon.com

P. J. Winzer, G. Raybon, H. Song, A. Adamiecki, S. Corteselli, A. H. Gnauck, and D. A. Fishman
Alcatel-Lucent,Bell Labs, 791 Holmdel-Keyport Rd., Holmdel, New Jersey 07733, USA.
Email: winzer@alcatel-lucent.com

T. Kawanishi
National Institute of Information and Communications Technologies (NICT), 4-2-1 Nukui-Kita, Koganei, Tokyo 184-8795, Japan.
K. Higuma
Sumitomo Osaka Cement, 585 Toyotomi, Funabashi, Chiba 274-8601, Japan.
Y. Painchaud
TeraXion, 2716 Rue Einstein, Quebec, G1P 4S8, Canada.

Abstract: We report on a 107-Gb/s field trial carrying live HDTV traffic over a 504-km in-service
DWDM route, proving that commercial systems designed for 10G/40G can be upgraded to 100G
without impacting existing active channels.
OCIS codes: (060.4510) Optical communications; (060.2360) Fiber optics links and subsystems; (060.4080) Modulation

Introduction
Per-channel bit rates of around 100 Gb/s have become the next logical step [1] for carriers to scale transport
networks in order to meet the ever increasing customer demand for higher capacities and to support services such as
telemedicine, remote data storage, or video with minimal lead time. Standards bodies such as the IEEE 802.3 Higher
Speed Study Group (HSSG) voted to support both 40-Gb/s and 100-Gb/s as the next Ethernet rates [2] and the ITU-
T Study Group 15 has started to develop an OTU-4 specification in G.709 to support 100G [3]. In parallel, transport
equipment vendors have made significant progress in 100G technologies [4-6], and network service providers
continue to publish their activity on 100G [7-9]. However, most of the publications to date have been results from
research labs, with a few exceptions: Deutsche Telekom and Alcatel reported a field trial in which eight 85.4-Gb/s
signals were transmitted over 421 km of field installed fiber (Darmstadt – Mönsheim, Germany [7]). Siemens,
AT&T, and collaborators reported a 107-Gb/s channel transmitted over 160 km of field installed fiber (Asbury Park
– Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey [8]); however, neither carried live traffic or co-propagated with other channels on
an existing optical networking infrastructure. Here, we report a joint field trial of Verizon and Alcatel-Lucent,
sending a 107-Gb/s channel carrying live video traffic over a 504-km in-service DWDM route (Tampa – Miami,
Florida). The 100G channel propagated with nine 10G DWDM neighbors. This field trial demonstrates that 100G
channels can be overlaid onto an existing in-service DWDM infrastructure, which has significant economic
advantages to carriers. Going beyond our first results [11], where we used pseudo-random bit patterns, this is, to the
best of our knowledge, the first 100G field trial carrying live traffic over a commercial optical transport platform.



Fig. 1a. Field fiber route selected for this
Fig. 1b. DWDM system supporting the 107-Gb/s channel
Tampa
Miami
39km(SMF) + 72km(LEAF)
96km(LEAF)
93km(LEAF)
106km(LEAF)
89km(LEAF) + 9km(SMF)
10-Gb/s
channels
107-Gb/s Tx
107-Gb/s Rx
10-Gb/s
channels
ROADM
ROADM
Florida, USA
Verizon national
video service network
100G field trial route
Video traffic
Video traffic
Alcatel-Lucent
LambdaXtreme
Ultra-long haul
system

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Selected field route for this field trial
As shown in Fig. 1, we chose the 504-km route between Tampa and Miami, Florida for this trial, supported by
Alcatel-Lucent’s LambdaXtreme® equipment from Verizon’s national Ultra Long Haul (ULH) DWDM network.
LambdaXtreme® is a 50-GHz spaced Raman-pumped DWDM system operating in the extended L-band [12]. There
were nine existing 10G DWDM channels on the route. The 10G channels were bi-directional (on separate fibers)
and the 100G channel was uni-directional. Of the nine 10G channels, three were providing transport services, two
were pilot channels, and four were new turn ups. The live traffic on the 10G channels was protected at the SONET
or IP layer during the trial, but no protection mechanisms were triggered during the entire trial period. As shown in
Fig. 2a, the frequencies of the nine 10G channels were between 186.70 THz and 188.70 THz. The 100G channel
was added at the Tampa ROADM as an alien wavelength at 188.60 THz (100 GHz away from the nearest 10G
channel) and was dropped at a ROADM in Miami.. The performance of the 10G channels was monitored before,
during, and after the trial by the network operations center to ensure there was no impact to the customer traffic due
to the introduction of the 100G channel. The video traffic was provided by Verizon's national video service network
at Tampa and fed into the 100G system. At Miami, the video signal was handed from the 100G stream to a local de-
multiplexing unit and displayed on an HDTV monitor as shown in Fig 2b.

Set-up of video traffic carried by the 100G channel
The modulation format used in this trial is differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK) at 53.5 Gbaud, with
the associated high-speed opto-electronics and the FPGA-based precoding hardware described in Refs. 4, 11, and
13. Fig. 3 shows a detailed signal flow diagram for this trial at both the transmitter and receiver nodes. At the
transmitter, an OC192 signal, which contained live video traffic, was tapped optically from Verizon’s national FiOS
video service network. The tapped OC192 signal was fed to the client port of the 100G equipment. There, the
OC192 signal was passed through G.709 compliant enhanced forward error correction (FEC) and framing to
produce OTU2 frames. The OTU2 signal at 10.7 Gb/s was 1:2 demultiplexed to enter an FPGA (Xilinx Virtex II
ProX) at 2 x 5.35 Gb/s. As discussed in Ref. 13, the single 10G client was immediately duplicated within the FPGA
to obtain a true 107-Gb/s data bus, on which the FPGA then performed the necessary DPQSK precoding, and put out
a bus of 16 x 6.6875-Gb/s signals. These were 8:1 multiplexed in two groups to represent the 53.5-Gb/s in-phase (I)
and quadrature (Q) components of the 107-Gb/s DQPSK signal. The 107-Gb/s return-to-zero DQPSK (RZ-DQPSK)
signal [4, 11] was then fed into the LambdaXtreme® system, which carried the signal 504 km to the receiver node.
At the receiver, the signal was dropped using a LambdaXtreme® ROADM and fed into the 100G receiver. The
receiver consisted of a delay interferometer with a 67-GHz free spectral range and low polarization dependence,
followed by balanced detection and a 1:2 electronic data & clock recovery demultiplexer (CDR). After further
demultiplexing to a 6.6875-Gb/s data bus, the signal entered another FPGA for extraction of a single OTU2 signal (2
x 5.35 Gb/s). This signal was passed to an FEC decoder to arrive at the original OC192 signal containing the live
HDTV video traffic. The OC192 was fed into a standard Fujitsu FW4500 to map four of the STS-1s into a GbE
channel. The GbE signal was then fed into a video test set (JDSU DTS-330) to extract HDTV signals for display.
No video signal defects were observed during the trial and all of the 10G channels remained error free.
In summary, this field trial demonstrates the viability of carrying live traffic on a 100G wavelength over a deployed
10G/40G optical line system without changing any of the embedded networking infrastructure or control software.
-40
-30
-20
-10
0
186.5 187187.5
Frequency (THz)
188188.5189
Relative Intensity (dB)
107-Gb/s
Rest were 10-Gb/s
Fig. 2a. Spectrum at receiver
Fig. 2b. Left: 100G TX; Right: 100G RX and transmitted video

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Acknowledgement
The authors sincerely appreciate the support in the trial from F. Briggs, M. Wegleitner, J. Cook, M. Poling, J.
McManus, S. Elby, J. McLaughlin, D. Place, R. Price, J. Rush, C. Mayer, D. MacBeth, V. Calderon, W. Uliasz, M.
Calderwood, J. Slyman, D. Day, J. Casper, R. Bohne, K. Prial, M. Swengros, R. Mills, A. Laparidis, K. Wagner, T.
Mooar, R. Flanagan, L. Thibodeaux, J. Badarack, J. Gulino, D. Pitchforth, D. Peterson, D. Bhattacharya, S. Hosley,
S. Wudtke, R. Carter, J. Moore, J. Fasolino, K. Van Inwegen, S. Lee, J. Motter, V. Shukla, M. Carroll, T. Damiano,
W. Patton, H. Ellis, S. O’Neill, F. Price, T. Kennedy, F. Horton, J. Marinos, T. Lee, J. Munoz, J. Dean, R. Feldt, K.
Bedevian, B. Nelson, N. Denkin, C. R. Doerr, M. Duelk, T. Carenza, T. Kissell, T. Downs, T. Chien, E. Goode, M.
Zirngibl, R. Tkach, A. Chraplyvy, C. Kao, R. Goudreault, L. Buhl, and W. Thompson. Our appreciation also goes to
Fujitsu for the support to FW4500 system and to JDSU for the support to the video test set.
References
[1] P. J. Winzer et al., "100G Ethernet – A Review of Serial Transport Options," IEEE LEOS Annual Meeting 2007, Paper MA2.2.
[2] IEEE 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group, http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/hssg/index.html.
[3] ITU-T Study Group 15, http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com15/index.asp.
[4] P. J. Winzer et al., “10 x 107-Gb/s NRZ-DQPSK Transmission at 1.0 b/s/Hz over 12 x 100 km Including 6 Optical Routing Nodes,” OFC
2007, Paper PDP24.
[5] C. R. S. Fludger et al., “10 x 111 Gbit/s, 50 GHz spaced, POLMUX-RZ-DQPSK transmission over 2375 km employing coherent
equalization,” OFC 2007, Paper PDP22.
[6] S. Chandrasekhar et al., "Hybrid 107-Gb/s Polarization-Multiplexed DQPSK and 42.7-Gb/s DQPSK Transmission at 1.4-bits/s/Hz Spectral
Efficiency over 1280 km of SSMF and 4 Bandwidth-Managed ROADMs," ECOC 2007, Paper PD 1.9.
[7] K. Schuh et al., “8x85.4 Gbit/s WDM Field Transmission over 421 km SSMF Link Applying an 85.4 Gbit/s ETDM Receiver,” ECOC 2005,
Paper We2.2.2.
[8] S. L. Jansen et al., “107-Gb/s full-ETDM transmission over field installed fiber using vestigial sideband modulation,” OFC 2007, Paper
OWE3.
[9] A. Sano et al., "30 x 100-Gb/s All-Optical OFDM Transmission over 1300 km SMF with 10 ROADM Nodes," ECOC 2007, Paper PD 1.7.
[10] P. Hoffman et al., "DWDM long haul network deployment for the Verizon GNI national network," OFC 2005, OTuP5.
[11] T. J. Xia et al., “Transmission of 107-Gb/s DQPSK over Verizon 504-km Commercial LambdaXtreme Transport System,”
OFC/NFOEC’2008, Paper NMC2.
[12] D. A. Fishman et al., LambdaXtreme® transport system: R&D of a high capacity system for low cost ultra long haul DWDM transport, Bell
Labs Tech. J. 11(2), 27-53 (2006).
[13] H. Song et al., “Multiplexing and DQPSK Precoding of 10.7-Gb/s Client Signals to 107 Gb/s Using an FPGA,” OFC 2008, Paper OTuG3.
FEC
10.7G
2 x 5.35G
Tx FPGA
for
DQPSK
precoding
2:1
2:1
2:1
2:1
16 x 6.6875G
2:1
2:1
2:1
2:1
8 x 13.375G
4:1
4:1
DQPSK
modulator
53.5G
In-phase
53.5G
Quadrature
OC192
107G
Tampa, FL
(Transmitter node)
GbE
107G
53.5G
6.6875G
2:8
2:1
2:8
26.75G
5.35G
10.7G
100G Tx
100G Rx
LambdaXtreme®
DWDM ultra-long
haul ROADM
OC192
Miami, FL
(Receiver node)
HDTV Video
1:2
LambdaXtreme®
DWDM ultra-long
haul ROADM
504 km field transmission
DI
In-phase
DI
Quadrat.
Rx FPGA
for
Client
selection
&
Rate
Adaptation
FEC
Video
test set
Rate
converter
SONET
test set
1:2
CDR
1:2
CDR
Verizon national video
service network
Optical
Tap
Fig. 3. Set-up for live video traffic carried by a 107-Gb/s DQPSK channel.