5G New Infrastructure Offers Optical Communication A New Round Of Development Opportunities

With the continuous promotion of new high broadband services and applications such as the Internet, cloud computing and big data, optical communication technology and application have developed rapidly in recent years. The networking technologies such as broadband optical access, metropolitan optical transmission and trunk optical transmission have been continuously innovated, the laying scale of optical cable network has continued to grow, and the optical fiber communication network has become one of the key infrastructures for the development of information society.

Recently, China has proposed to speed up the construction of 5G networks, data centers and other "new infrastructure", which will further accelerate the development of new optical communication technology innovation and industrial application.

5G infrastructure gives birth to a new round of development opportunities for optical communication

5G construction, bearing first. Optical communication technology is the core of the carrier networks. In order to support 5G new business features such as high bandwidth, low delay and high precision synchronization, as well as intelligent, flexible, efficient and open networking features such as network architecture innovation, 5G bearer network technology is also constantly evolving in recent two years, and there are many different new bearer schemes emerging in the application scenarios such as forward and backpropagation, such as based on CWDM and DWDM The 25Gbit / s rate forwarding scheme based on WDM, lwdm and mwdm, and the medium return scheme based on SPN and ipran.

In addition, the transmission interface rate of 5G bearing network is also increasing, the typical forward transmission rate rises from 10Gbit / s to 25Gbit / s, and the middle return transmission rate rises to 25Gbit / s, 50gbit / s, 100Gbit / s or above. At the same time, the centralized processing cloud deployment (c-ran) of the base station further puts forward new requirements for the carrying scheme, the number and direction of optical fiber connections.

With the acceleration of 5G construction project, nearly 600000 base stations will be built soon. Based on multi-dimensional comparison and selection of technical solutions, overall cost and future scalability, different operators are expected to gradually start the construction and expansion of 5G forward and middle return networks. The forward transmission scheme will further focus on the selection and Application of new high-speed optical modules and devices in combination with the wireless access network architecture and application requirements Devices and 5G bearing new technology and equipment will be applied on a large scale, relevant international and domestic standardization will be further improved, and optical communication technology and industry as a whole will usher in a new round of development opportunities.

Data center construction extended optical communication application scenario

With the development of the information communication business model and cloud network integration technology, data center has become the key infrastructure of data interaction, sharing and application. Because of the huge workload of data storage and processing in data center, power consumption, integration, switching performance (such as delay, throughput), cost and other parameters are very important for the construction of data center, while optical fiber communication has the natural advantages of large capacity, low power consumption, high security, low cost of the transmission medium, etc., the internal connection of data center and the interconnection scheme between data centers are far away Without the support of optical fiber communication technology and products.

First of all, the large-scale construction of the data center will inevitably lead to the large-scale application of low-cost, high-speed optical modules and supporting products, which will further promote the optimization and improvement of optical module and device technology and autonomous capacity.

Secondly, the massive connection demand in the data center will promote the application of all-optical switching technology, further reduce the internal power consumption and transmission delay of the data center, and further improve the integration and increase the intelligence of large bandwidth granularity scheduling.

Finally, the transmission demand of massive data between data centers promotes the further innovation of optical transmission equipment, which enables the transmission equipment to further optimize or design the transmission equipment needed by the data center and further extend the application scenarios of optical communication technology on the basis of providing ultra-wide bandwidth and combining the application requirements of interface opening, intelligent management and control, and high integration.

On the whole, accelerating the large-scale construction of data center will promote the innovation and development of optical communication-related technologies and industries, and it is expected that a variety of optical communication technology solutions for data center applications will emerge in the future.