Optical & Wireless

Communication
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
• Learn the basic principle of optical fiber communication with different modes of
light propagation.
• Study the different optical components and its applications in optical communication
networks.
• Understand the concepts of propagation over wireless channels from a physics
standpoint
• Understand the multiple access techniques used in cellular communications standards.
• Apply the communication theory to understand GSM systems that can handle
mobile telephony.
COURSE OBJECTIVES:
• Classify the characterization of optical fibers with different modes of signal propagation.
• Identify the constructional features and the characteristics of optical fiber and optical devices
used for signal transmission and reception.
• Make use of the essential principles of mobile radio channels in cellular Communication.
• Employ the various multiple access techniques used in wireless communication systems.
• Utilize the GSM architecture to establish call set up, call progress handling and call tear down
in a GSM cellular network
 Module 1

Optical Fiber Structures:

Optical Fiber Modes and Configurations, Mode theory for circular waveguides,
Single mode fibers, Fiber materials.

Attenuation and Dispersion:

Attenuation, Absorption, Scattering Losses, Bending loss, Signal Dispersion:
Modal delay, Group delay, Material dispersion.

Gerd Keiser, Optical Fiber Communication, 5th Edition, McGraw Hill Education
(India) Private Limited, 2016. ISBN:1-25-900687-5.
Basic Concepts of Communication Systems
Basic motivations:
• Improve the transmission fidelity so that fewer errors occur in the received message
• Increase the transmission capacity of a communication link so that more information could be sent
• Increase the transmission distance between relay stations so that messages can be sent farther

Terms and concepts that are used in communications

• Information: content or interpretation of something
• Message: physical manifestation of the information
• Data: facts, concepts, or instructions, encoded entities that are used to convey the information
• Signals: electromagnetic waves
Block diagram of a typical communication link connecting separate LANs.
Analog Signal Formats
• An analog signal conveys information through a continuous and smooth variation in time of a
physical quantity such as optical, electrical, or acoustical intensities and frequencies.
• An optical signal can vary in color and its intensity may change from dim to bright.

• An electric signal can vary in frequency and its intensity can range from low to high voltages.

• The intensity of an acoustical signal can range from soft to loud, and its tone can vary from a
low rumble to a very high pitch.
Digital Signal Formats
• A digital signal is an ordered sequence of discrete symbols selected from a finite set of
elements.
 Evolution of Communication Technology
Pony Express
• Riders on horseback traversed vast distances, delivering mail and messages with unprecedented
speed. This innovative service significantly reduced the time it took for information to travel across
the country, contributing to the expansion of commerce, government, and social connections in the
rapidly growing nation.
Telegraph
• Real-time transmission of messages over long distances through electrical signals
• Developed in the early 19th century, the telegraph facilitated rapid communication between distant
locations, playing a crucial role in industries such as journalism, finance, and transportation.
Telephone
• Interpersonal communication, allowing individuals to converse in real-time across great distances
Radio
• Mass communication to the airwaves.
• Radio became a ubiquitous medium for news, entertainment, and cultural dissemination, shaping
public discourse and fostering a sense of national unity.
Television
• Television emerged as the dominant medium of communication in the mid-20th century, offering
both audiovisual entertainment and news programming to millions of households across the
country. The rise of television transformed not only entertainment but also political campaigns,
advertising, and societal norms. It became a powerful tool for shaping public opinion and
influencing cultural attitudes.
Communication System
 Types of Communication Channel

telephone communication Local Area Network glass or ultra-pure plastic

Copper excellent noise form of light
cheaper immunity cable TV
two insulated conductors LAN
telephone
communication
 Advantages of Optical Fibers
• Long Distance Transmission :
– Have lower transmission losses compared to copper wires.
– Data can be sent over longer distances
– Reduce the number of intermediate repeaters needed to boost and restore signals in long spans.
– Decreases system cost and complexity.
• Large Information Capacity
– Wider bandwidths
– more information can be sent over a single physical line.
– Decreases the number of physical lines needed for sending a given amount of information.
• Small Size and Low Weight
• Immunity to Electrical Interference
– Dielectric material, which means it does not conduct electricity.
– Immune to the electromagnetic interference effects seen in copper wires
 Advantages of Optical Fibers
• Enhanced Safety
• Increased Signal Security
– Optical signal is well-confined within the fiber and an opaque coating around the fiber absorbs
any signal emissions.
Key Elements of Optical Fiber Systems

Fiber optics technology involves the emission, transmission, and detection of light
 The Nature of Light
• Light consisted of a stream of minute particles
• Were emitted by luminous sources
• These particles were pictured as traveling in straight lines
• Penetrate transparent materials but were reflected from opaque ones
 Optical Fiber Modes and Configurations
• Fiber Types
– An optical fiber is a dielectric waveguide that operates at optical frequencies.
– This fiber waveguide is normally cylindrical in form.
– It confines electromagnetic energy in the form of light to within its surfaces
and guides the light in a direction parallel to its axis.
– The transmission properties of an optical waveguide are dictated by its
structural characteristics, which have a major effect in determining how an
optical signal is affected as it propagates along the fiber.
– The structure basically establishes the information-carrying capacity of the
fiber and also influences the response of the waveguide to environmental
perturbations.
– The propagation of light along a waveguide can be described in terms of a set of
guided electromagnetic waves called the modes of the waveguide.
– These guided modes are referred to as the bound or trapped modes of the waveguide.
– Each guided mode is a pattern of electric and magnetic field distributions that is
repeated along the fiber at equal intervals.
– Only a certain discrete number of modes are capable of propagating along the guide.
– These modes are those electromagnetic waves that satisfy the homogeneous wave
equation in the fiber and the boundary condition at the waveguide surfaces.
– boundary condition
 The tangential components of the electric field* should be equal to zero.
 The normal derivative of the tangential component of the magnetic field** should be equal to zero.
*the part of the electric field that is parallel to a surface
**the part of the magnetic field that is perpendicular to a surface
Schematic of a conventional silica fiber structure. A circular solid core of refractive index n1 is surrounded by
a cladding having a refractive index n2< n1. An elastic plastic buffer encapsulates the fiber.
– This cylinder is known as the core of the fiber.
– The core is surrounded by a solid dielectric cladding, which has a refractive
index n that is less than n .
2 1

– The cladding reduces scattering loss that results from dielectric discontinuities
at the core surface, it adds mechanical strength to the fiber, and it protects the
core from absorbing surface contaminants with which it could come in
contact.
– In standard optical fibers the core material is highly pure silica glass (SiO2)
compound and is surrounded by a glass cladding.
– Most fibers are encapsulated in an elastic, abrasion-resistant plastic material,
which adds further strength to the fiber and mechanically isolates or buffers
the fibers from small geometrical irregularities, distortions, or roughnesses of
adjacent surfaces.
Comparison of conventional single-mode and multimode step-index and graded index optical fibers
– Variations in the material composition of the core give rise to the 2 commonly
used fiber types:
– In the first case, the refractive index of the core is uniform throughout and
undergoes an abrupt change (or step ) at the cladding boundary. This is called
a step-index fiber.
– In the second case, the core refractive index is made to vary as a function of
the radial distance from the center of the fiber. This type is a graded-index
fiber.
– Both the step- and the graded-index fibers can be further divided into single-
mode and multimode classes.
– A single-mode fiber sustains only one mode of propagation
– Multimode fibers contain many hundreds of modes.
– Advantages of multimode fibers:
The larger core radii of multimode fibers make it easier to launch optical power into the
fiber and facilitate the connecting together of similar fibers.
Light can be launched into a multimode fiber using a light-emitting diode (LED) source,
whereas single-mode fibers must generally be excited with laser diodes.
– Disadvantages of multimode fibers:
They suffer from intermodal dispersion: When an optical pulse is launched into a fiber,
the optical power in the pulse is distributed over all (or most) of the modes of the fiber.
Each of the modes that can propagate in a multimode fiber travels at a slightly different
velocity. This means that the modes in a given optical pulse arrive at the fiber end at
slightly different times, thus causing the pulse to spread out in time as it travels along the
fiber. This effect, which is known as intermodal dispersion or intermodal distortion, can
be reduced by using a graded-index profile in a fiber core. This allows graded-index
fibers to have much larger bandwidths (data rate transmission capabilities) then step-
index fibers.
Higher bandwidths are possible in single-mode fibers, where intermodal dispersion
effects are not present.
• Rays and Modes
– The electromagnetic light field that is guided along an optical fiber can be
represented by a superposition of bound or trapped modes.
– Each of these guided modes consists of a set of simple electromagnetic field
configurations.
– For monochromatic light fields of radian frequency w, a mode traveling in the
positive z direction (i.e., along the fiber axis) has a time and z dependence
given by

– The factor β is the z component of the wave propagation constant k = 2π/λ

and is the main parameter of interest in describing fiber modes.
• Step-Index Fiber Structure
– In practical step-index fibers the core of radius a has a refractive index n ,1

which is typically equal to 1.48, is surrounded by a cladding of slightly lower

index n , where
2

– The parameter Δ is called the core-cladding index difference or simply the

index difference.
– Values of n are chosen such that Δ is nominally 0.01.
2

– Since the core refractive index is larger than the cladding index,
electromagnetic energy at optical frequencies is made to propagate along the
fiber waveguide through internal reflection at the core-cladding interface.
• Ray Optics Representation
– The two types of rays that can propagate in a fiber are meridional rays and
skew rays.
– Meridional rays:
Are confined to the meridian planes of the fiber, which are the planes that contain the axis
of symmetry of the fiber (the core axis).
Meridional ray lies in a single plane
Its path is easy to track as it travels along the fiber.
Meridional rays can be divided into two general classes: bound rays that are trapped in
the core and propagate along the fiber axis according to the laws of geometrical optics,
and unbound rays that are refracted out of the fiber core.
– Skew rays :
Are not confined to a single plane, but instead tend to follow a helical-type path along the
fiber
These rays are more difficult to track as they travel along the fiber because they do not lie
in a single plane.
• The meridional ray is shown for a step-index fiber.
• The light ray enters the fiber core from a medium of refractive index n at an angle ϴ0 with
respect to the fiber axis and strikes the core-cladding interface at a normal angle φ.
• If it strikes this interface at such an angle that it is totally internally reflected, then the
meridional ray follows a zigzag path along the fiber core, passing through the axis of the
guide after each reflection.
• From Snell’s law, the minimum or critical angle fc that supports total internal reflection for
the meridional ray is given by
• Rays striking the core-cladding interface at angles less than φc will refract out of the core and
be lost in the cladding, as the dashed line shows.
• By applying Snell’s law to the air–fiber face boundary, the condition of equation can be
related to the maximum entrance angle ϴ0,max, which is called the acceptance angle ϴA,
through the relationship

• where
• Thus those rays having entrance angles ϴ0 less than ϴA will be totally internally reflected at
the core–cladding interface.
• Thus ϴA defines an acceptance cone for an optical fiber.
• The above equation also defines the numerical aperture (NA) of a step-index fiber for
meridional rays:

• Since the numerical aperture is related to the acceptance angle, it is commonly used to
describe the light acceptance or gathering capability of a fiber and to calculate source-to-fiber
optical power coupling efficiencies.
• The numerical aperture is a dimensionless quantity which is less than unity, with values
normally ranging from 0.14 to 0.50.
1. Consider a multimode silica fiber that has a core refractive index n1 = 1.480
and a cladding index n2 = 1.460. Find (a) the critical angle, (b) the numerical
aperture, and (c) the acceptance angle.

2. Consider a multimode fiber that has a core refractive index of 1.480 and a
core-cladding index difference 2.0 percent (Δ = 0.020). Find the (a) numerical
aperture, (b) the acceptance angle, and (c) the critical angle.
Mode Theory for Circular Waveguides

Electric field distributions for several of the lower-order guided modes in a

symmetrical-slab waveguide
• An important parameter connected with the cutoff condition is the
V number defined by

• This parameter is a dimensionless number that determines how

many modes a fiber can support.
 Single-Mode Fibers
• Single-mode fibers are constructed by letting the dimensions of the
core diameter be a few wavelengths and by having small index
differences between the core and the cladding.
• Single-mode propagation is possible for fairly large variations in
values of the physical core size a and the core-cladding index
differences Δ.
• However, in practical designs of single-mode fibers the core-
cladding index difference varies between 0.2 and 1.0 percent, and
the core diameter should be chosen to be just below the cutoff of
the first higher-order mode; that is, for V slightly less than 2.4.
• Mode-Field Diameter
– In single-mode fibers the geometric distribution of light in the propagating mode
is what is needed when predicting the performance characteristics of these fibers.
– Thus a fundamental parameter of a single-mode fiber is the mode-field diameter
(MFD).
– This parameter can be determined from the mode-field distribution of the
fundamental fiber mode and is a function of the optical source wavelength, the
core radius, and the refractive index profile of the fiber.
– The mode-field diameter is analogous to the core diameter in multimode fibers,
except that in single-mode fibers not all the light that propagates through the fiber
is carried in the core.
– The MFD is an important parameter for single-mode fiber because it is used to
predict fiber properties such as splice loss, bending loss, cutoff wavelength,
and waveguide dispersion.
– A variety of models have been proposed for characterizing and measuring the
MFD.
– These include far-field scanning, near-field scanning, transverse offset,
variable aperture in the far field, knife-edge, and mask methods.
– The main consideration of all these methods is how to approximate the optical
power distribution.
– A standard technique to find the MFD is to measure the far-field intensity
distribution (r) and then calculate the MFD using the Petermann II equation
– where 2w0 (called the spot size) is the full width of the far-field distribution.
– For calculation simplicity the exact field distribution can be fitted to a Gaussian function

– where r is the radius and E0 is the field at zero radius.

– Then the MFD is given by the 1/ width of the optical power.
• Propagation Modes in Single-Mode Fibers
– The electric field of the light propagating along the fiber is a linear superposition of
the two polarization modes and depends on the polarization of the light at the
launching point into the fiber.

– In ideal fibers with perfect rotational symmetry, the two modes are degenerate with
equal propagation constants (kx = ky), and any polarization state injected into the
fiber will propagate unchanged.
– In actual fibers there are imperfections, such as asymmetrical lateral stresses,
noncircular cores, and variations in refractive-index profiles.
– These imperfections break the circular symmetry of the ideal fiber and lift the
degeneracy of the two modes.
– The modes propagate with different phase velocities, and the difference between their
effective refractive indices is called the fiber birefringence,
– Equivalently, we may define the birefringence as,
– where is the free-space propagation constant.
– If light is injected into the fiber so that both modes are excited, then one will be
delayed in phase relative to the other as they propagate.
– When this phase difference is an integral multiple of 2π, the two modes will beat at
this point and the input polarization state will be reproduced.
– The length over which this beating occurs is the fiber beat length,
1. A single mode optical fiber has a beat length of 8 cm at 1300 nm. What is
the birefringence?
 Attenuation
• Attenuation of a light signal as it propagates along a fiber is an important
consideration in the design of an optical communication system.
• The degree of attenuation plays a major role in determining the maximum
transmission distance between a transmitter and a receiver or an in-line
amplifier.
• The basic attenuation mechanisms in a fiber are absorption, scattering, and
radiative losses of the optical energy.
• Absorption is related to the fiber material.
• Scattering is associated both with the fiber material and with structural
imperfections in the optical waveguide.
• Attenuation owing to radiative effects originates from perturbations (both
microscopic and macroscopic) of the fiber geometry.
• Attenuation Units
– As light travels along a fiber, its power decreases exponentially with distance.
– If P(0) is the optical power in a fiber at the origin (at z = 0), then the power
P(z) at a distance z farther down the fiber is
– where is the fiber attenuation coefficient.
– For simplicity in calculating optical signal attenuation in a fiber, the common
procedure is to express the attenuation coefficient in units of decibels per
kilometer, denoted by dB/km.
– Designating this parameter by α, we have

– This parameter is generally referred to as the fiber loss or the fiber attenuation
• Absorption
– As Absorption is caused by three different mechanisms:
1. Absorption by atomic defects in the glass composition.
2. Extrinsic absorption by impurity atoms in the glass material.
3. Intrinsic absorption by the basic constituent atoms of the fiber material.
– Atomic defects are imperfections in the atomic structure of the fiber material.
– Examples of these defects include missing molecules, high-density clusters of atom
groups, or oxygen defects in the glass structure.
– Usually, absorption losses arising from these defects are negligible compared with
intrinsic and impurity absorption effects. However, they can be significant if the fiber
is exposed to ionizing radiation, as might occur in a nuclear reactor environment, in
medical radiation therapies, in space missions that pass through the earth’s Van Allen
belts, or in accelerator instrumentation.
– In such applications, high radiation doses may be accumulated over several years .
– Radiation damages a material by changing its internal structure.
– The damage effects depend on the energy of the ionizing particles or rays (e.g.,
electrons, neutrons, or gamma rays), the radiation flux (dose rate), and the fluence
(particles per square centimeter).
– The total dose a material receives is expressed in units of rad(Si), which is a measure
of radiation absorbed in bulk silicon.
– This unit is defined as
– The basic response of a fiber to ionizing radiation is an increase in attenuation owing
to the creation of atomic defects, or attenuation centers, that absorb optical energy.
– The higher the radiation level, the larger the attenuation.
– The degree of the radiation effects depends on the dopant materials used in the fiber.
– Pure silica fibers or fibers with a low Ge doping and no other dopants have the lowest
radiation-induced losses.
– The dominant absorption factor in silica fibers is the presence of minute quantities of
impurities in the fiber material.
– These impurities include OH- (water) ions that are dissolved in the glass and
transition metal ions such as iron, copper, chromium, and vanadium.
– Impurity absorption losses occur either because of electron transitions between the
energy levels within these ions or because of charge transitions between ions.
– The absorption peaks of the various transition metal impurities tend to be broad, and
several peaks may overlap, which further broadens the absorption in a specific region.
– The presence of OH ion impurities in a fiber preform results mainly from the
oxyhydrogen flame used in the hydrolysis reaction of the SiCl , GeCl , and POCl
4 4 3

starting materials.
– Intrinsic absorption is associated with the basic fiber material (e.g., pure SiO2) and is
the principal physical factor that defines the transparency window of a material over
a specified spectral region.
– Intrinsic absorption sets the fundamental lower limit on absorption for any particular
material; it is defined as the absorption that occurs when the material is in a perfect
state with no density variations, impurities, or material inhomogeneities.
– Intrinsic absorption results from electronic absorption bands in the ultra violet region
and from atomic vibration bands in the near-infrared region.
– The electronic absorption bands are associated with the band gaps of the amorphous
glass materials.
– Absorption occurs when a photon interacts with an electron in the valence band and
excites it to a higher energy level.
– The ultraviolet edge of the electron absorption bands of both amorphous and crystal
line materials follow the empirical relationship
– which is known as Urbach’s rule. Here, C and E are empirical constants and E is the photon energy.
0

– Since E is inversely proportional to the wavelength λ, ultraviolet absorption decays

exponentially with increasing wavelength.
– In particular, the ultraviolet loss contribution in dB/km at any wave length (given in
mm) can be expressed empirically (derived from observation or experiment) as a
function of the mole fraction x of GeO as 2

Consider two silica fibers that are doped with 6 percent and 18 percent
mole fractions of GeO2, respectively. Compare the ultraviolet
absorptions at wavelengths of 0.7 µm and 1.3 µm.
• Scattering Losses
– Scattering losses in glass arise from microscopic variations in the material density,
from compositional fluctuations, and from structural inhomogeneities or defects
occurring during fiber manufacture.
– Glass is composed of a randomly connected network of molecules. Such a structure
naturally contains regions in which the molecular density is either higher or lower
than the average density in the glass.
– In addition, since glass is made up of several oxides, such as SiO2, GeO2, and P2O5,
compositional fluctuations can occur.
– These two effects give rise to refractive-index variations that occur within the glass
over distances that are small compared with the wavelength.
– These index variations cause a Rayleigh-type scattering of the light.
– Rayleigh scattering in glass is the same phenomenon that scatters light from the sun
in the atmosphere, thereby giving rise to a blue sky.
– The expressions for scattering-induced attenuation are fairly complex owing to the
random molecular nature and the various oxide constituents of glass.
– For single-component glass the scattering loss at a wavelength λ (given in µm)
resulting from density fluctuations can be approximated by

– Here, n is the refractive index, k is Boltzmann’s constant

B

– is the isothermal compressibility of the material ,

– The fictive temperature T is the temperature at which the density fluctuations are
f

frozen into the glass as it solidifies.

– Alternatively,

– where p is the photoelastic coefficient

– For multicomponent glasses the scattering at a wavelength λ (measured in mm) is
given by

– where the square of the mean-square refractive-index fluctuation over a

volume of is

– the density fluctuation is

– the concentration fluctuation of the i’th glass component is
– Their magnitudes must be determined from experimental scattering data.
– Structural inhomogeneities and defects created during fiber fabrication can also cause
scattering of light out of the fiber.
– These defects may be in the form of trapped gas bubbles, unreacted starting
materials, and crystallized regions in the glass.
– In general, the preform manufacturing methods that have evolved have minimized
these extrinsic effects to the point where scattering that results from them is
negligible compared with the intrinsic Rayleigh scattering.
• Bending Losses
– Radiative losses occur whenever an optical fiber undergoes a bend of finite radius of
curvature.
– Fibers can be subject to two types of curvatures: (a) macroscopic bends, having radii
that are large compared with the fiber diameter, such as those that occur when a fiber
cable turns a corner, and (b) random microscopic bends of the fiber axis that can arise
when the fibers are incorporated into cables.
• Core and Cladding Losses
– Since the core and cladding have different indices of refraction and therefore differ in
composition, the core and cladding generally have different attenuation coefficients.
– If the influence of modal coupling is ignored, the loss for a step-index waveguide is

– Using

this can be written as

– The total loss of the waveguide can be found by summing over all modes weighted by the
fractional power in that mode.
– For the case of a graded-index fiber the situation is much more complicated.
– In this case, both the attenuation coefficients and the modal power tend to be functions of
the radial coordinate.
– At a distance r from the core axis the loss is
 Signal Dispersion in Fibers

• An optical signal weakens from attenuation mechanisms and

broadens due to dispersion effects as it travels along a fiber.
• These two factors will cause neighboring pulses to overlap.
• After a certain amount of overlap occurs, the receiver can no
longer distinguish the individual adjacent pulses and errors arise
when interpreting the received signal.
• Overview of Dispersion Origins
– Signal dispersion is a consequence of factors such as intermodal delay (also called
intermodal dispersion), intramodal dispersion, polarization-mode dispersion, and
higher-order dispersion effects.
– These distortions can be explained by examining the behavior of the group velocities
of the guided modes.
– The group velocity is the speed at which energy in a particular mode travels along the
fiber
– Intermodal delay (or simply modal delay) appears only in multimode fibers.
Modal delay is a result of each mode having a different value of the group velocity at a
single frequency.
From this effect one can derive an intuitive picture of the information carrying capacity
of a multimode fiber.
⁻ Intramodal dispersion or chromatic dispersion is pulse spreading that takes
place within a single mode.
 This spreading arises from the finite spectral emission width of an optical source.
 The phenomenon also is known as group velocity dispersion, since the
dispersion is a result of the group velocity being a function of the wavelength.
 Because intramodal dispersion depends on the wavelength, its effect on signal
distortion increases with the spectral width of the light source.
 The spectral width is the band of wavelengths over which the source emits light.
 This wavelength band normally is characterized by the root-meansquare (rms)
spectral width
 The two main causes of intramodal dispersion are as follows:
1. Material dispersion arises due to the variations of the refractive index of the core
material as a function of wavelength. Also is referred to as chromatic dispersion, since
this is the same effect by which a prism spreads out a spectrum. This refractive index
property causes a wavelength dependence of the group velocity of a given mode; that
is, pulse spreading occurs even when different wavelengths follow the same path.
2. Waveguide dispersion causes pulse spreading because only part of the optical power
propagation along a fiber is confined to the core. Within a single propagating mode,
the cross-sectional distribution of light in the optical fiber varies for different
wavelengths. Shorter wavelengths are more completely confined to the fiber core,
whereas a larger portion of the optical power at longer wavelengths propagates in the
cladding,
 The refractive index is lower in the cladding than in the core, so the fraction of light power
propagating in the cladding travels faster than the light confined to the core.
 The index of refraction depends on the wavelength so that different spectral components within
a single mode have different propagation speeds.
 Dispersion thus arises because the difference in core-cladding spatial power distributions,
together with the speed variations of the various wavelengths, causes a change in propagation
velocity for each spectral component.
 The degree of waveguide dispersion depends on the fiber design.
 Waveguide dispersion usually can be ignored in multimode fibers, but its effect is significant in
single-mode fibers.
– Polarization-mode dispersion results from the fact that light-signal energy at a given
wavelength in a single-mode fiber actually occupies two orthogonal polarization states or
modes.
– At the start of the fiber the two polarization states are aligned.
– However, since fiber material is not perfectly uniform throughout its length, each polarization
mode will encounter a slightly different refractive index.
– Consequently each mode will travel at a slightly different velocity.
– The resulting difference in propagation times between the two orthogonal polarization modes
will cause pulse spreading.
• Modal Delay
– Intermodal dispersion or modal delay appears only in multimode fibers.
– This signal-distorting mechanism is a result of each mode having a different value of
the group velocity at a single frequency.
– The steeper the angle of propagation of the ray congruence, the higher is the mode
number and, consequently, the slower the axial group velocity.
– This variation in the group velocities of the different modes results in a group delay
spread, which is the intermodal dispersion.
– This dispersion mechanism is eliminated by single-mode operation but is important
in multimode fibers.
– The maximum pulse broadening arising from the modal delay is the difference
between the travel time T of the longest ray congruence paths (the highest-order
max

mode) and the travel time T of the shortest ray congruence paths (the fundamental
min

mode).
– This broadening is simply obtained from ray tracing and for a fiber of length L is
given by

– where
• Group Delay
– Consider an electrical signal that modulates an optical source. For this case, assume that the
modulated optical signal excites all modes equally at the input of the fiber.
– Each waveguide mode thus carries an equal amount of energy through the fiber.
– Furthermore, each mode contains all the spectral components in the wavelength band
over which the source emits.
– In addition, assume that each of these spectral components is modulated in the same
way.
– As the signal propagates along the fiber, each spectral component can be assumed to
travel independently and to undergo a time delay or group delay per unit length t /L g

in the direction of the propagation given by

– Here, L is the distance traveled by the pulse, β is the propagation constant along the fiber
axis, and the group velocity

is the velocity at which the energy in a pulse travels along a fiber.

– Since the group delay depends on the wavelength, each spectral component of any
particular mode takes a different amount of time to travel a certain distance.
– As a result of this difference in time delays, the optical signal pulse spreads out with
time as it is transmitted over the fiber.
– The total delay difference over a distance L is

– In terms of the angular frequency ω, this is written as

• is designated as the dispersion.
• It defines the pulse spread as a function of wave length and is measured in picoseconds per kilometer
per nanometer [ps/(nm . km)].
• It is a result of material and waveguide dispersion.
• Material Dispersion
– Each Material dispersion occurs because the index of refraction varies as a function
of the optical wavelength.
– Since the group velocity of a mode is a function of the index of refraction, the
various spectral components of a given mode will travel at different speeds,
depending on the wavelength.
– Material dispersion is, therefore, an intramodal dispersion effect and is of particular
importance for single-mode wave guides and for LED systems.
– To calculate material-induced dispersion, consider a plane wave propagating in an
infinitely extended dielectric medium that has a refractive index n(λ) equal to that of
the fiber core.
– The propagation constant β is thus given as
– The group delay resulting from material dispersion.