High-speed Communications using Multimode Fibres

Abstract:

Today optical fibre based communication is the best, or may be the only choice for any long haul and high data rate communication application. One of the major reasons for the large scale deployment of mobile phone networks in our country and elsewhere is the reliable and cost effective optical fibre based back bone communication links. 

Telecommunication applications use single-mode fibres extensively as they offer the highest bandwidth (hundreds of GHz) and the lowest loss (0.16 dB/km). However, there are several applications where multimode fibres could be used for high speed applications. These applications include short haul, high data rate applications (say, 1 to 10 Gb/s, 300 to 1 km)  as well as home networking applications where system cost, alignment and ease of use are the major considerations. 

The talk would briefly cover the use of multimode glass optical fibres (GOF) for short haul very high data rate applications, and the emerging area of using plastic optical fibres (POF) for short haul, high data rate applications. The latter one could result in cheaper and easy to manage home networking applications.


About the speaker:

Joseph John received the B.Sc. (Eng.) degree in electronics and communication from the University of Kerala, in 1978, the M.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras,  in 1980, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Birmingham, U.K., in 1993. 

He was a Research Engineer with the Advanced Centre for Electronic Systems, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, from 1981 to 1989. From 1993 to 2010, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, first as an Assistant Professor and then an Associate Professor and a Professor. Since 2010, he has been a Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

His research interests are optical fiber communication systems, optical fiber sensors, and modern electronic systems. He has published several research papers in reputed journals and conferences. He has also co-authored a book titled ‘Virtual Instrumentation using LabVIEW’. 

He has been involved in a variety of R&D projects both at IIT Kanpur and at IIT Bombay. As a Research Engineer at IIT Kanpur he was instrumental in developing an LED based 10 Mb/s 5 km digital link (850nm) in the early 80s and in the late 80s an 18 km, 45 Mb/s link using 1300 nm devices. Another interesting project completed successfully and transferred to the RDSO Lucknow, Indian Railways in 2010 was the ‘Trackside Bogie Monitoring System’ project developed as part of the Technology Mission on Railway Safety.