abstract:
Communication is an important part of our daily life. The communication process involves information generation, transmission, reception and interpretation. As needs for various types of communication such as voice, images, video and data communications increase demands for large transmission capacity also increase. This need for large capacity has driven the rapid development of light wave technology; a worldwide industry has developed. An optical or light wave communication system is a system that uses light waves as the carrier for transmission. An optical communication system mainly involves three parts. Transmitter, receiver and channel. In optical communication transmitters are light sources, receivers are light detectors and the channels are optical fibers. In optical communication the channel i.e, optical fibers play an important role because it carries the data from transmitter to the receiver. Hence, here we shall discuss mainly about optical fibers.
. Introduction
Optical fibers are arguably one of the world’s most influential scientific developments from the latter half of the 20th century. Normally we are unaware that we are using them, although many of us do frequently. The majority of telephone calls and internet traffic at some stage in their journey will be transmitted along an optical fiber. Why has the development of fibers been given so much attention by the scientific community when we have alternatives? The main reason is bandwidth – fibers can carry an extremely large amount of information. More indirectly, many of the systems that we either rely on or enjoy in everyday life such as banks, television and newspapers as (to name only a very limited selection) are themselves dependent on communication systems that are dependent on optical fibers.
2. Fundamentals of Fibers
The fundamental principle that makes optical fibers possible is total internal reflection. This is described using the ray model of light as shown in figure 1.
