Palestrantes

Joseph M. Kahn is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His current research is on optical communication in single-mode fibers, multi-mode fibers and free-space links, addressing modulation, coding, detection, signal processing and spatial multiplexing methods. He received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from U.C. Berkeley in 1981 and 1986. From 1987-1990, he was at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Crawford Hill Laboratory, in Holmdel, NJ. From 1990-2003, he was on the Electrical Engineering faculty at U.C. Berkeley. In 2000, he co-founded StrataLight Communications, which was acquired by Opnext, Inc. in 2009. He received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Optical MIMO Transmission: Opportunities and Challenges

Optical network traffic continues to grow exponentially, with estimates of the growth rate ranging from 30% to 90% per year. In long-haul core networks, the throughput per single-mode fiber is now within a factor of two of nonlinear information-theoretic limits, owing to astonishing progress in optics, communications and signal processing, which has utilized fully the physical dimensions of time, frequency, amplitude-phase, and polarization. Exploiting the spatial dimension is the key to achieving further increases in optical transmission capacity. Spatial multiplexing options include multiple strands of single-mode fiber, densely packed multi-core fibers, or multi-mode fibers. In this talk, I will review these options and focus on mode-division multiplexing in multi-mode fibers, which is a form of multi-input multi-output transmission. I will discuss my research on fundamental properties propagation, particularly the coupling between propagating modes, which has highly beneficial effects on system performanc and implementation complexity.