Optical fiber communication refers to a technique of communication in which light signals are conveyed from one location to another using optical fiber as the medium. The electrical signal is turned into light for transmission through optical fiber, and is then converted back into electrical signal at the receiving end. Audio, video, or telemetry data can all be included in the transmissions, which may take place via wide or narrow area networks. The success of optical fiber communication in high-speed, long-distance data transport has led to its implementation in a wide range of communication settings.
How do Fiber Optic Communication works?
In optical fiber communication, the electrical impulses are transformed into light before transmission, and the reverse is performed at the receiving end.
A schematic explanation of this procedure is provided below:
Transmitter side:
At the transmitter end, the data is either sent through a light source transmitter circuit or, if analog, through a coder or converter circuit to be transformed into digital pulses of 0,1,0,1… (depending on the data). If the input is digital, it is transferred straight to the circuit that turns the light source into a transmitter of light waves.
Optical Fiber Cable:
The light waves received from the transmitter circuit to the fiber optic cable is now transmitted from the source location to the destination and received at the receiver block.
Receiver Side:
The light waves go via the optical fiber line, and the photocell, also called a light detector, amplifies and digitizes them at the receiving end. If the signal is digital, no further processing is done, but if it must be converted to analog for the output source, the decoder circuit is used to do so.
Optical fiber communication refers to the method of communicating an electrical signal from one location to another by turning the signal into light and then sending it through a fiber optic connection.
Why Fiber is used?
Since fiber wires offer more benefits than electrical cables, they have largely supplanted copper wire as the transmission cable of choice.
- Large Transmission capacity: A single silica fiber can carry hundreds of thousands of telephone channels, utilizing only a small part of the theoretical capacity.
- Small Losses: Approximately 0.2 dB/km signal is lost for modern single-mode silica fibers so that many tens of kilometers can be bridged without amplifying the signals.
- Easy Amplification: A large number of channels can be reamplified in a single fiber amplifier if required for very large transmission distances.
- Low Cost: Due to the huge transmission rate achievable, the cost per transported bit can be extremely low.
- LightWeight: Compared with electrical cables, fiber-optic cables are very lightweight.
- No Interference: Fiber-optic cables are immune to problems that arise with electrical cables, such as ground loops or electromagnetic interference (EMI).
The advantages of fiber optic cables over traditional transmission mediums, such as coaxial copper cables, have been thoroughly documented.
Why light and not Electricity?
Since laser light has a consistent frequency over its whole spectrum, it is ideal for use in optical fiber communication. Compared to a laser, which emits a single beam of light, other light signals like sunlight or bulb light have several wavelengths of light, resulting in a beam that is very much weaker if utilized for communication.
Therefore, light is an efficient medium for communication due to its small dispersion, high signal-to-noise ratio, and low latency.
Characteristics of Fibre Optic Communication
Light is utilized to carry information in an optical fiber communication system. This form of communication is beneficial because of its salient features, which warrant further discussion.
- Bandwidth – Single laser light dispersion means that a good amount of signal can be transmitted (Information being transferred in bits) per second which results in high bandwidth for long distances.
- Smaller diameter – The diameter of Optical fiber cable is about 300 micrometers in diameter.
- Light-weight – The Optical fiber cable is light in weight compared to the copper cable.
- Long-distance signal transmission – Since the laser light doesn’t disperse, it can be easily transmitted over long distances.
- Low attenuation – The fiber is made of glass and laser is traveling through it, the signal transmitted has only 0.2 dB/km loss.
- Transmission security – Optical encryption and no presence of the electromagnetic signal make the data secure over optical fiber.
Applications of Optical Fiber
Optical fiber communication is mainly used in the telecommunication industry which uses the optical fiber for:
- Telephone Signals transmission.
- Internet Communication.
- Cable Television Signal transmission.
Apart from it, optical fibre nowadays, is used everywhere in homes, industries, offices for long distance as well as for small distance communication.
Opotical Fiber Impact on IoT (Internet of Things)
These items will show you why the Internet of Things (IoT) would benefit greatly from fiber optic communication.
- Fast Transmission Media – In the future, everything will be connected to the internet, thus we’ll need reliable connections and fast speeds for the Internet of Things (IoT). Optical Fiber is the only transmission medium that can meet this specification. In order to facilitate communications and large-scale data transfer in a matter of seconds, IoT will require optical fiber for optimum communication in the future.
- Data Security – When we consider the massive amounts of data that will be transmitted between the billions of devices that make up the IoT, security naturally becomes our top priority. Unless it’s transmitted over optical fiber, hacking of data from communication media is conceivable. It’s nearly tough to break into optical fiber networks without being noticed. Again, an optical fiber can aid in the safe transfer of data at an impressive rate.
- No data loss due to interference – Optical fiber lines don’t experience any data loss from electromagnetic interference and can be put anywhere (including underwater or in high-temperature environments).