As redes de telecomunicações se dividem em redes de longa distância, redes metropolitanas e redes de acesso. As redes de longa distância e metropolitana usufruem a alta capacidade de largura de banda da fibra óptica, enquanto nas redes de acesso há um gargalo de largura de banda por causa do uso de pares de fios e cabo coaxial. Para solucionar este problema e oferecer aos usuários acesso banda larga de baixo custo foram propostas as redes ópticas passivas (passive optical network - PON). A PON é formada por dois elementos básicos, a unidade de rede óptica (optical network unit - ONU), localizada perto dos assinantes, e o terminal de linha óptica (optical line terminal - OLT), localizado próximo ao provedor de serviços. Dentre os padrões disponíveis para redes PON, o Ethernet (EPON), padronizado pelo grupo IEEE 802.3ah, é opção atraente porque ele é bastante difundido nas redes locais. O protocolo de controle multiponto (multipoint control protocol - MPCP), já especificado, é responsável pelo controle de acesso ao meio, fornecendo infra-estrutura de sinalização para transmissão entre OLT e ONUs. Entretanto, o algoritmo de alocação de largura de banda, que realiza o controle de acesso ao meio com base no MPCP, foi considerado fora do escopo de trabalho do grupo de trabalho, permitindo que seja desenvolvido pelos fornecedores de equipamentos. Neste trabalho, arquiteturas de rede EPON e o protocolo MPCP são descritos e algoritmos de alocação de largura de banda são avaliados mediante simulação computacional. São abordados os algoritmos de alocação de largura de banda que integram multiplexação estatística e técnicas para o suporte a classes de serviços diferenciados, com base no esquema de multiplexação por divisão no tempo (time division multiplexing - TDM). Algoritmos que integram a multiplexação por divisão em comprimento de onda (wavelength division multiplexing - WDM) à arquitetura EPON TDM são também investigados. Os algoritmos WDM-TDM permitem a atualização progressiva da EPON que emprega o esquema TDM para WDM. / Telecommunication networks are divided into core, metropolitan and access networks. The core and metropolitan networks use high capacity bandwidth optical fibers, while the access networks have bandwidth bottlenecks because of the use of twisted-pair wires and coaxial cable. To solve this problem and to offers the users broadband access at low cost the use of passive optical networks (PON) is proposed. A PON is formed by two basic elements, the optical network unit (ONU), positioned close to the customers and the optical line terminal (OLT), located close to the service provider. Within the available standards for PON networks, the Ethernet (EPON), standardised by the IEEE group 802.3ah, is an attractive option because it is already widely used in local networks. The multipoint control protocol (MPCP), already specified, is responsible for the media access control, providing signaling infrastructure for transmission between OLT and ONUs. However, the bandwidth allocation algorithm, that controls access based on MPCP, was considered outside the scope of the work group, permitting that this be developed by equipment providers. In this work, EPON architectures and the MPCP protocol are described and bandwidth allocation algorithms are evaluated with computational simulation. Bandwidth allocation algorithms which integrate statistical multiplexing and techniques to support for differentiated classes of service, based on time division multiplexing (TDM) scheme are investigated. Algorithms that integrate wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to the EPON TDM architecture are also investigated. The WDM-TDM algorithms permit the progressive upgrade of EPON based TDM to WDM schemes.

Os sistemas ópticos atuais, baseados em fibras monomodo, operam próximos ao limite teórico da capacidade. Sistemas ópticos baseados em multiplexação modal (Mode Division Multiplexing – MDM) possibilitam o aumento da capacidade do sistema por meio do uso de fibras de poucos modos. Nestes sistemas, a propriedade de ortogonalidade entre os modos propagantes permite que cada modo espacial carregue um sinal óptico específico. O amplificador à fibra dopada com érbio (Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier – EDFA) segue fundamental para assegurar a transmissão em longas distâncias. No entanto, devido às distintas distribuições de intensidade dos modos que compõem o sinal de entrada, cada modo experimenta diferentes valores de ganho. Desta forma, o objetivo principal no projeto de EDFAs de poucos modos (Few-Mode Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier – FM-EDFA) é determinar os melhores parâmetros opto-geométricos da fibra para produzir uma amplificação eficiente. A metodologia normalmente empregada é baseada na resolução das equações de taxa e de propagação. Nesta tese, é proposta uma metodologia alternativa de projeto de FM-EDFA, baseada em uma nova figura de mérito. Este parâmetro quantifica o nível de inversão da população dos íons na fibra a partir da integral de superposição (overlap integral), considerando tanto o perfil de dopagem da fibra dopada com érbio para poucos modos (Few-Mode Erbium-Doped Fiber – FM-EDF) quanto as distribuições de intensidade dos sinais de entrada e de bombeio. A aplicação desta metodologia permite reduzir, em cerca de 25-40 vezes, o número de resoluções das equações de taxa e de propagação e, consequentemente, diminuir o tempo de processamento e reduzir o esforço computacional. Como consequência da maior velocidade de processamento, torna-se possível a aplicação de métodos de otimização mais rigorosos, permitindo uma busca em um espaço irrestrito de soluções. Especificamente, a partir de uma metodologia baseada em algoritmos genéticos, obteve-se um perfil de dopagem otimizado. É também demonstrado que os perfis com geometria circular exibem melhores características, como excelente desempenho do FM-EDFA e maior facilidade de fabricação. Por meio da análise da figura de mérito, é mostrado que o desempenho do FM-EDFA é afetado pelas características do modo de bombeio. Finalmente, o desempenho de um sistema óptico MDM é avaliado, simulado por meio da integração entre as ferramentas MatLab® e VPItransmissionMakerTM, comprovando a necessidade do projeto de um amplificador específico para sistemas MDM. / Modern optical systems based on single-mode fiber, operate close to the theoretical capacity limit. By using few-mode fibers, optical systems based on modal division multiplexing (MDM) allows increased system capacity. In these systems, orthogonality between the propagating modes allows each spatial mode to carry a specific optical signal. The erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) remains essential to ensure long distance transmission. However, due to the distinct intensity profile distributions of the modes which comprise the input signal, each mode experiences a different value of optical gain. Thus, the main objective in the few-mode EDFA design (FM-EDFA) is to determine the best opto-geometrical fiber parameters in order to produce an efficient amplification. The methodology normally used is based on the simultaneous resolution of the rate and propagation equations. In this thesis, we propose an alternative methodology for the FM-EDFA design, based on a new figure of merit which quantifies the level of population inversion for the Er ions in the fiber, by means of a overlap integral considering both the doping profile of the few-mode erbium doped fiber (FM-EDF) as well as the intensity distributions of the optical signals and pump beams. This methodology reduces, by a factor of 25-40, the number of resolutions of the rate and propagation equations, thereby decreasing processing time and computational effort. As a consequence of the improved processing speed, it becomes possible to apply more rigorous optimization methods in an unrestricted solution space. Specifically, by using a genetic algorithm technique, we obtained an optimized doping profile. It is also shown that profiles with circular geometry exhibit improved features, such as excellent FM-EDFA performance and ease of manufacturing. By analyzing the figure of merit, it is shown that the FM-EDFA performance is affected by the characteristics of the pump mode. Finally, the performance of an MDM optical system is evaluated, by integrating Matlab and VPI simulation tools, to demonstrate the need for specific amplifier designs in MDM systems.

This research proposes a new dynamic energy management framework for a backbone Internet Protocol over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (IP over DWDM) network. Maintaining the logical IP-layer topology is a key constraint of our architecture whilst saving energy by infrastructure sleeping and virtual router migration. The traffic demand in a Tier 2/3 network typically has a regular diurnal pattern based on people‟s activities, which is high in working hours and much lighter during hours associated with sleep. When the traffic demand is light, virtual router instances can be consolidated to a smaller set of physical platforms and the unneeded physical platforms can be put to sleep to save energy. As the traffic demand increases the sleeping physical platforms can be re-awoken in order to host virtual router instances and so maintain quality of service. Since the IP-layer topology remains unchanged throughout virtual router migration in our framework, there is no network disruption or discontinuities when the physical platforms enter or leave hibernation. However, this migration places extra demands on the optical layer as additional connections are needed to preserve the logical IP-layer topology whilst forwarding traffic to the new virtual router location. Consequently, dynamic optical connection management is needed for the new framework. Two important issues are considered in the framework, i.e. when to trigger the virtual router migration and where to move virtual router instances to? For the first issue, a reactive mechanism is used to trigger the virtual router migration by monitoring the network state. Then, a new evolutionary-based algorithm called VRM_MOEA is proposed for solving the destination physical platform selection problem, which chooses the appropriate location of virtual router instances as traffic demand varies. A novel hybrid simulation platform is developed to measure the performance of new framework, which is able to capture the functionality of the optical layer, the IP layer data-path and the IP/optical control plane. Simulation results show that the performance of network energy saving depends on many factors, such as network topology, quiet and busy thresholds, and traffic load; however, savings of around 30% are possible with typical medium-sized network topologies.

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 2011

Fibre-optic sensors have been the focus of a lot of research, but their associated high cost has stifled their transferral from the laboratory to real world applications. This thesis addresses the issue of multiplexing, a technology that would lower the cost per unit sensor of a sensor system dramatically. An overview of the current state of research of, and the principles behind, multiplexed sensor networks is given. A new scheme of multiplexing, designated W*DM, is developed and implemented for a fibre Bragg grating (FBG) optical fibre sensor network. Using harmonic analysis, multiplexing is performed in the domain dual to that of the wavelength domain of a sensor. This scheme for multiplexing is compatible with the most commonly used existing schemes of WDM and TDM and thus offers an expansion over, and a resultant cost decrease from, the sensor systems currently in use. This research covered a theoretical development of the scheme, a proof of principle, simulated and experimental analysis of the performance of the multiplexed system, investigation into sensor design requirements and related issues, fabrication of the sensors according to the requirements of the scheme and the successful multiplexing of eight devices (thus offering an eightfold increase over current network capacities) using this scheme. Extensions of this scheme to other fibre sensors such as Long Period Gratings (LPGs) and blazed gratings were also investigated. Two LPGs having a moir?? structure were successfully multiplexed and it was shown that a blazed Fabry Perot grating could be used as a tuneable dual strain/refractive index sensor. In performing these tests, it was discovered that moir?? LPGs exhibited a unique thermal switching behaviour, hereto unseen. Finally the application of fibre sensors to the civil engineering field was investigated. The skill of embedding optical fibre in concrete was painstakingly developed and the thermal properties of concrete were investigated using these sensors. Field tests for the structural health monitoring of a road bridge made from a novel concrete material were performed. The phenomenon of shrinkage, creep and cracking in concrete was investigated showing the potential for optical fibre sensors to be used as a viable research tool for the civil engineer.

Fault localization is the process of realizing the true source of a failure from a set of collected failure notifications. Isolating failure recovery within the network optical domain is necessary to resolve alarm storm problems. The introduction of the monitoring trail (m-trail) has been proven to deliver better performance by employing monitoring resources in a form of optical trails - a monitoring framework that generalizes all the previously reported counterparts. In this dissertation, the m-trail design is explored and a focus is given to the analysis on using m-trails with established lightpaths to achieve fault localization. This process saves network resources by reducing the number of the m-trails required for fault localization and therefore the number of wavelengths used in the network. A novel approach based on Geographic Midpoint Technique, an adapted version of the Chinese Postman’s Problem (CPP) solution and an adapted version of the Traveling Salesman’s Problem (TSP) solution algorithms is introduced. The desirable features of network architectures and the enabling of innovative technologies for delivering future millimeter-waveband (mm-WB) Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) systems for wireless services integrated in a Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) is proposed in this dissertation. For the conceptual illustration, a DWDM RoF system with channel spacing of 12.5 GHz is considered. The mm-WB Radio Frequency (RF) signal is obtained at each Optical Network Unit (ONU) by simultaneously using optical heterodyning photo detection between two optical carriers. The generated RF modulated signal has a frequency of 12.5 GHz. This RoF system is easy, cost-effective, resistant to laser phase noise and also reduces maintenance needs, in principle. A revision of related RoF network proposals and experiments is also included. A number of models for Passive Optical Networks (PON)/ RoF-PON that combine both innovative and existing ideas along with a number of solutions for m-trail design problem of these models are proposed. The comparison between these models uses the expected survivability function which proved that these models are liable to be implemented in the new and existing PON/ RoF-PON systems. This dissertation is followed by recommendation of possible directions for future research in this area.

This thesis focuses on the survivable routing problem in WDM mesh networks where the objective is to minimize the total number of wavelengths used for establishing working and protection paths in the WDM networks. The past studies for survivable routing suffers from the scalability problem when the number of nodes/links or connection requests grow in the network. In this thesis, a novel path based shared protection framework namely Inter-Group Shared protection (I-GSP) is proposed where the traffic matrix can be divided into multiple protection groups (PGs) based on specific grouping policy. Optimization is performed on these PGs such that sharing of protection wavelengths is considered not only inside a PG, but between the PGs. Simulation results show that I-GSP based integer linear programming model, namely, ILP-II solves the networks in a reasonable amount of time for which a regular integer linear programming formulation, namely, ILP-I becomes computationally intractable. For most of the cases the gap between the optimal solution and the ILP-II ranges between (2-16)%. The proposed ILP-II model yields a scalable solution for the capacity planning in the survivable optical networks based on the proposed I-GSP protection architecture.

In this thesis, different aspects of lattice-based precoding and decoding for the transmission of digital and analog data over MIMO fading channels are investigated: 1) Lattice-based precoding in MIMO broadcast systems: A new viewpoint for adopting the lattice reduction in communication over MIMO broadcast channels is introduced. Lattice basis reduction helps us to reduce the average transmitted energy by modifying the region which includes the constellation points. The new viewpoint helps us to generalize the idea of lattice-reduction-aided precoding for the case of unequal-rate transmission, and obtain analytic results for the asymptotic behavior of the symbol-error-rate for the lattice-reduction-aided precoding and the perturbation technique. Also, the outage probability for both cases of fixed-rate users and fixed sum-rate is analyzed. It is shown that the lattice-reduction-aided method, using LLL algorithm, achieves the optimum asymptotic slope of symbol-error-rate (called the precoding diversity). 2) Lattice-based decoding in MIMO multiaccess systems and MIMO point-to-point systems: Diversity order and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff are two important measures for the performance of communication systems over MIMO fading channels. For the case of MIMO multiaccess systems (with single-antenna transmitters) or MIMO point-to-point systems with V-BLAST transmission scheme, it is proved that lattice-reduction-aided decoding achieves the maximum receive diversity (which is equal to the number of receive antennas). Also, it is proved that the naive lattice decoding (which discards the out-of-region decoded points) achieves the maximum diversity in V-BLAST systems. On the other hand, the inherent drawbacks of the naive lattice decoding for general MIMO fading systems is investigated. It is shown that using the naive lattice decoding for MIMO systems has considerable deficiencies in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. Unlike the case of maximum-likelihood decoding, in this case, even the perfect lattice space-time codes which have the non-vanishing determinant property can not achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. 3) Lattice-based analog transmission over MIMO fading channels: The problem of finding a delay-limited schemes for sending an analog source over MIMO fading channels is investigated in this part. First, the problem of robust joint source-channel coding over an additive white Gaussian noise channel is investigated. A new scheme is proposed which achieves the optimal slope for the signal-to-distortion-ratio (SDR) curve (unlike the previous known coding schemes). Then, this idea is extended to MIMO channels to construct lattice-based codes for joint source-channel coding over MIMO channels. Also, similar to the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff, the asymptotic performance of MIMO joint source-channel coding schemes is characterized, and a concept called diversity-fidelity tradeoff is introduced in this thesis.

The interest in wireless communications among consumers has exploded since the introduction of the "3G" cell phone standards. One reason for their success is the increasingly higher data rates achievable through the networks. A further increase in data rates is possible through the use of multiple antennas at either or both sides of the wireless links. Precoding and receive filtering using matrices obtained from a singular value decomposition (SVD) of the channel matrix is a transmission strategy for achieving the channel capacity of a deterministic narrowband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications channel. When signalling over wideband channels using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), an SVD must be performed for every sub-carrier. As the number of sub-carriers of this traditional approach grow large, so does the computational load. It is therefore interesting to study alternate means for obtaining the decomposition. A wideband MIMO channel can be modeled as a matrix filter with a finite impulse response, represented by a polynomial matrix. This thesis is concerned with investigating algorithms which decompose the polynomial channel matrix directly. The resulting decomposition factors can then be used to obtain the sub-carrier based precoding and receive filtering matrices. Existing approximative polynomial matrix QR and singular value decomposition algorithms were modified, and studied in terms of decomposition quality and computational complexity. The decomposition algorithms were shown to give decompositions of good quality, but if the goal is to obtain precoding and receive filtering matrices, the computational load is prohibitive for channels with long impulse responses. Two algorithms for performing exact rational decompositions (QRD/SVD) of polynomial matrices were proposed and analyzed. Although they for simple cases resulted in excellent decompositions, issues with numerical stability of a spectral factorization step renders the algorithms in their current form purposeless. For a MIMO channel with exponentially decaying power-delay profile, the sum rates achieved by employing the filters given from the approximative polynomial SVD algorithm were compared to the channel capacity. It was shown that if the symbol streams were decoded independently, as done in the traditional approach, the sum rates were sensitive to errors in the decomposition. A receiver with a spatially joint detector achieved sum rates close to the channel capacity, but with such a receiver the low complexity detector set-up of the traditional approach is lost. Summarizing, this thesis has shown that a wideband MIMO channel can be diagonalized in space and frequency using OFDM in conjunction with an approximative polynomial SVD algorithm. In order to reach sum rates close to the capacity of a simple channel, the computational load becomes restraining compared to the traditional approach, for channels with long impulse responses.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is an efficient multi- carrier modulation scheme, which has been adopted for several wireless stan- dards. Systems employing this scheme at the physical layer are sensitive to frequency offsets and that causes Inter Carrier Interference (ICI) and degra- dation in overall system performance of OFDM systems. In this thesis work, an investigation on impairments of OFDM systems will be carried out. Anal- ysis of previous schemes for cancellation of the ICI will be done and a scheme for estimating and compensating the frequency offset based on Unscented Ka- man Filter (UKF) and Extended Kaman Filter (EKF) will be implemented. Analysis on how the UKF improves the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR); and how well it tracks the frequency offset estimation under Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel and flat fading Rayleigh channel will be carried on.