Page 20 - Fiber Bragg Gratings

Chapter 1

Introduction

Optical fibers have revolutionized telecommunication. Much of the success
of optical fiber lies in its near-ideal properties: low transmission loss, high
optical damage threshold, and low optical nonlinearity. The combination
of these properties has enabled long-distance communication to become
a reality. At the same time, the long lengths enabled the optical power
to interact with the small nonlinearity to give rise to the phenomenon of
optical solitons, overcoming the limit imposed by linear dispersion. The
market for optical fiber continues to grow, despite the fact that major
trunk routes and metropolitan areas have already seen a large deployment
of fiber. The next stage in the field of communication is the mass delivery
of integrated services, such as home banking, shopping, Internet services,
and entertainment using video-on-demand. Although the bandwidth
available on single mode fiber should meet the ever-increasing demand
for information capacity, architectures for future networks need to exploit
technologies which have the potential of driving down cost to make ser-
vices economically viable. Optical fiber will have to compete with other
transport media such as radio, copper cable, and satellite. Short-term
economics and long-term evolutionary potential will determine the type
of technology likely to succeed in the provision of these services. But it
is clear that optical fibers will play a crucial role in communication systems
of the future. The technological advances made in the field of photosensi-
tive optical fibers are relatively recent; however, an increasing number
of fiber devices based on this technology are getting nearer to the market
place. It is believed that they will provide options to the network designer
that should influence, for example, the deployment of wavelength-divi-

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