Efficient photonic coding

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Abstract
In this paper we reconsider the energy consumption of traditional DC-balanced physical line coding schemes applied to optical communication. We demonstrate that not only does an implementation of the popular 8B10B coding scheme have higher power consumption than the optical power requirement, but actually has higher power consumption when transmitting idle sequences than for real data packets. Furthermore, we show that simple codes retain the DC balance performance of 8B10B and hence do not increase the optical power requirement. We propose the use of a coding scheme that permits a default-off transmission system through the addition of a preamble. By analysis of trace data taken from a network covering a 24 hour period, we show that the power saving is up to 93%. The proposed approach not only enables energy proportional links but is fully compatible with future low power optical switched networks.

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