Fiber Optic Communication System Simulator (FOCSS)

Benefits
  • helps optimize system design before costly prototyping
  • helps design and test new services on existing optical plant
  • achieves excellent agreement between actual and simulated system performance
  • is user friendly and easy to customize and extend accounts for all significant noise sources and real system impairments
Business Opportunity:

Software that provides detailed, high accuracy simulations of fiber optic communication systems has been developed at TRLabs and is now available for licensing.

Background:

We live in an era of exponentially growing demand for broadband telecommunication services. At the same time, government deregulation of the industry has resulted in new competition for both long haul and metropolitan service providers. With these factors at play, network planners are under intense pressure to design fiber optic networks to provide optimal performance at minimal cost. Also, network planners must find new ways to deliver broader band service through existing optical plant. To meet these challenges, they need software that allows them to design and test communication systems with confidence. They need software that allows them to isolate the root causes of limited system performance. FOCSS (Fiber Optic Communication System Simulator) provides the solution. FOCSS was developed at TRLabs as part of ongoing research into high-speed fiber optic communications. It has been used to design and analyze a wide variety of systems. FOCSS is distinguished by the remarkable agreement it achieves between simulated and actual performance of real systems (see Figure 1). Its detailed model accounts for all significant noise sources and allows users to isolate dominant constraints on system performance.

FOCSS was developed using MATLAB™'s high-level programming language. However, users do not require any MATLAB™ programming skills--they control FOCSS through a graphical user interface that makes the simulator easy to use, modify, and extend.

Figure 1: Actual and FOCSS simulated multilevel signaling at 10 GB/s

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