Why compensating fibre nonlinearity will never meet capacity demands

TL;DR

This paper reviews the fundamental limits of optical fiber communication, emphasizing that increasing power alone cannot surpass the practical capacity limit of around 1 Pbit/s due to intrinsic fiber and device constraints.

Contribution

It clarifies the fundamental and practical limits of optical fiber capacity, arguing that compensating fiber nonlinearity alone cannot meet future capacity demands.

Findings

Empirical capacity limit of approximately 1 Pbit/s for standard single mode fiber.

Increasing optical power beyond this limit yields diminishing capacity gains.

Fundamental and practical constraints prevent surpassing the 1 Pbit/s capacity threshold.

Abstract

Current research efforts are focussed on overcoming the apparent limits of communication in single mode optical fibre resulting from distortion due to fibre nonlinearity. It has been experimentally demonstrated that this Kerr nonlinearity limit is not a fundamental limit; thus it is pertinent to review where the fundamental limits of optical communications lie, and direct future research on this basis. This paper details recently presented results. The work herein briefly reviews the intrinsic limits of optical communication over standard single mode optical fibre (SMF), and shows that the empirical limits of silica fibre power handling and transceiver design both introduce a practical upper bound to the capacity of communication using SMF, on the order of 1 Pbit/s. Transmission rates exceeding 1 Pbit/s are shown to be possible, however, with currently available optical fibres, attempts to transmit beyond this rate by simply increasing optical power will lead to an asymptotically zero fractional increase in capacity.