New Ethernet based optically transparent network for fiber-to-the-desk application

We present a new optical local area network architecture based on multimode optical fibers and components, short wavelength lasers and detectors and the widely used fast Ethernet protocol. The presented optically transparent network represent a novel approach in fiber-to-the-desk applications. It is made to minimize the costs associated with a passive optical LAN implementation. The biggest issues in the realization of the network are the synchronization of bursty traffic and collision detection. We present, in detail, the solution to the synchronization problem by introducing an analog sinusoidal carrier that is in addition to the data signal only sent within the data packet duration. The extraction of data and the synchronization signal is made by using simple filtering, facilitating the receiver realization.