TOKYO, March, 21 2017 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc. today announced the development of a new technology to estimate the transmission performance, and to improve the throughput of optical networks.

When adding communication paths to existing optical networks using new wavelengths, the transmission speed was previously set at a safe operation level based on design specifications of optical fibers and communication devices. This was done as it was difficult to accurately determine the actual transmission performance of the optical fibers and communication devices that make up specific communication paths. This is why networks are operated under more restrictive conditions that lead to lower network throughput than the network should be able to support.

Now Fujitsu Laboratories and Fujitsu Laboratories of America have developed a technology to learn the actual characteristics of an optical network, and accurately estimate the supported transmission speed of newly added communication paths by observing the bit error ratio (BER)(1) of the optical signals of communication paths already in operation. This newly developed technology was experimentally evaluated on a testbed simulating an optical network in which the largest transmission distance was about 1,000km, and it was confirmed that the estimates erred by less than 15 per cent. In addition, in network simulations carried out based on the results of this experimental evaluation, it was confirmed that the throughput of the network as a whole could be improved by about 20 per cent. This technology has enabled the maximisation of the throughput of networks to provide highly efficient communication infrastructure.