Welcome to the Terabit Optical Networking Consortium

The Georgia Tech Terabit Optical Networking Consortium, founded in 2009, is supported by more than 12 companies including component manufacturers, software companies, fiber manufactures, equipment manufacturers and service providers.

A primary goal of the consortium is to lead advances in the quantitative understanding of optical, electronic and signaling interactions to enable the development of components, systems and design rules for dynamically reconfigurable 100Gbps and Terabit networks. The breadth of the consortium reflects the observation that modern high capacity optical communications systems require jointly optimized optical, electronic and signal processing strategies. The consortium enables GaTech and our Industry partners to lead development and understanding of the enabling technologies in these areas either cooperatively or, when necessary, separately.

The consortium, with support from Georgia Tech, has enabled the construction of a unique optical networking test bed that is the only University based Terabit test bed with a full complement of fiber types in the United States. The test bed is a shared research tool available to all consortium members, supports a wide variety of modulation formats including 16-QAM, and focuses on all aspects of high-speed optical transport systems using digital coherent detection. The consortium has advanced a number of aspects of 100G systems including quantifying nonlinear threshold scaling, improved crosstalk penalty prediction, crafted calibrated simulation tools, validated the Gaussian noise model and demonstrated margin scaling across many fiber types and created the super receiver concept demonstrating the advantages of joint demodulation to reduce inter-channel penalties in super channel systems.

Current efforts of the consortium include the investigation of strategies to achieve Terabit per second capacity per lamda fiber links using advanced modulation formats, new fiber designs and improved algorithms for coherent digital receivers and performance prediction in heterogeneous fiber networks. The efforts also focus on the continuous development of accurate simulations, and high-speed CMOS circuit design to support high data rates.

Professor Stephen Ralph leads the consortium and together with other groups has recently published more than 40 conferences and 10 journal papers, many with industry members as co-authors. Professor Ralph is also the director of the Georgia Electronic design Center