Erik Agrell

Tutorial: Fiber-Optic Channel Capacity

Abstract

In this tutorial, the information-theoretic notions of error-free transmission and channel capacity are briefly reviewed. The challenges when applying this theory to nonlinear channels, and particularly the nonlinear fiber channel, are discussed. Band-limitation and sampling are key concepts, which play fundamentally different roles in this context than for linear systems. Finally, some techniques to bound the channel capacity are summarized.

Biography

Erik Agrell is a Professor in Communication Systems and a Fellow of the IEEE. His research interests belong to the fields of information theory, coding theory, and digital communications. Apart from doing fundamental research in these fields, he also investigates their applications in optical communications, with the overall aim to design more efficient fiber-optical networks. He is a co-founder of the Fiber-Optic Communications Research Center (FORCE) at Chalmers, an interdisciplinary research environment where he leads activities in modulation, coding, and signal processing. In 2014–2017 he was a Visiting Professor at University College London.