Visible light communications using a Gallium-nitride (GaN) laser diode is reported. Devices, which are cased in TO packages, show modulation bandwidths of up to 1.4 GHz. We demonstrate error-free data transmission, defined as transmission of $1\times {10}^{-9}$ bits without any errors, at $2.5\mathrm{Gbit}/\mathrm{s}$ with a sensitivity of 11.5 dBm.

In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the benefit of polarization insensitive dual-band optical phase conjugation for up to ten 400 Gb/s optical super-channels using a Raman amplified transmission link with a realistic span length of 75 km. We demonstrate that the resultant increase in transmission distance may be predicted analytically if the detrimental impacts of power asymmetry and polarization mode dispersion are taken into account.

We demonstrate that a distributed Raman amplification scheme based on random distributed feedback (DFB) fiber laser enables bidirectional second-order Raman pumping without increasing relative intensity noise (RIN) of the signal. This extends the reach of 10 × 116 Gb/s DP-QPSK WDM transmission up to 7915 km, compared with conventional Raman amplification schemes. Moreover, this scheme gives the longest maximum transmission distance among all the Raman amplification schemes presented in this paper, whilst maintaining relatively uniform and symmetric signal power distribution, and is also adjustable in order to be highly compatible with different nonlinearity compensation techniques, including mid-link optical phase conjugation (OPC) and nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT).

We demonstrate that a combination of Raman laser based amplification and optical phase conjugation enables transmission beyond the nonlinear-Shannon limit. We show nonlinear compensation of 7×114Gbit/s DP-QPSK channels, increasing system reach by 30%.

We present, for the first time, a detailed investigation of the impact of second order co-propagating Raman pumping on long-haul 100G WDM DP-QPSK coherent transmission of up to 7082 km using Raman fibre laser based configurations. Signal power and noise distributions along the fibre for each pumping scheme were characterised both numerically and experimentally. Based on these pumping schemes, the Q factor penalties versus co-pump power ratios were experimentally measured and quantified. A significant Q factor penalty of up to 4.15 dB was observed after 1666 km using symmetric bidirectional pumping, compared with counter-pumping only. Our results show that whilst using co-pumping minimises the intra-cavity signal power variation and amplification noise, the Q factor penalty with co-pumping was too great for any advantage to be seen. The relative intensity noise (RIN) characteristics of the induced fibre laser and the output signal, and the intra-cavity RF spectra of the fibre laser are also presented. We attribute the Q factor degradation to RIN induced penalty due to RIN being transferred from the first order fibre laser and second order co-pump to the signal. More importantly, there were two different fibre lasing regimes contributing to the amplification. It was random distributed feedback lasing when using counter-pumping only and conventional Fabry-Perot cavity lasing when using all bidirectional pumping schemes. This also results in significantly different performances due to different laser cavity lengths for these two classes of laser.

Capacity enhancement by utilising the unused spectral bands of the low-loss optical window of standard single-mode fibre (SSMF) is a cost-effective solution for meeting the future demand of data traffic. The development of optical amplifiers that can operate in different spectral bands is expected to play an integral part in the establishment of multi-band networks. In this work, we perform experimental, analytical and numerical modelling of a multi-band transmission system using a hybrid distributed-discrete Raman amplifier enabling signal amplification from 1410-1605 nm. The developed amplifier was tested over 50km of SSMF using 200 Gbit/s channels, where successful transmission was achieved, well above the HD-FEC threshold of 8.5 dB. Further study on the multi-band transmission performance was carried out using a semi-analytical closed-form approximation and split-step Fourier method-based simulations for various related test cases. The analytical and numerical models are also compared with experimental results, showing reasonable agreement in terms of system performance estimation.