Forthcoming capacity scaling requirements of optical networks and advances in optical fiber communications beyond the omnipresent single-mode fiber operating over the conventional band introduces new opportunities and challenges for exploiting the expanded spectral and spatial resources available for fiber-optic network designs. The spectral and spatial degrees of freedom introduce utilization tradeoffs that can be leveraged under different applications. After briefly reviewing the supporting network building elements (emerging fiber types, multiplexers, optical switches, and amplifiers), we consider networking scenarios such as intra/inter datacenter, terrestrial, undersea, and wireless 5G/6G hauling networks and identify the best utilization plan and key attributes that can be harnessed by the offered spectral and spatial degrees of freedom for each scenario and how optical switching can be employed therein for traffic management. Networks supporting these scenarios are experiencing tremendous traffic growth pushing their existing implementations to their physical capacity-distance limits. New network builds must offer significant capacity multipliers in an efficient and cost-effective manner, requiring new switching solutions for supporting the unabated traffic growths foreseen in the years to come. We discuss how space-division multiplexed networks can help address this challenge in key communication scenarios.

For pt.I see ibid., vol.50, p.2018-31 (2002). In part I, we proposed and investigated a hybrid pulse position modulation/ultrashort light pulse code-division multiple-access (PPM/ULP-CDMA) system for ultrafast optical communication networks. In this scheme, the large bandwidth of a ULP is efficiently utilized by virtue of the very high time resolution of a time-space processor. More detailed analysis and discussion on the receiver scheme using the time-space processor is now presented; nonideal performance of the time-space processor, including the reference pulse realization problem, as well as amplifier and detector noise, are taken into account. Discussions on physically achievable ranges of the system parameters that determine the performance of the proposed PPM/ULP-CDMA system are also made based upon current, state of the art technology. As remedies to overcome the physical limitations on the system parameters, two modified modulation/demodulation schemes are proposed and investigated to enhance the performance of the hybrid PPM/ULP-CDMA system.

We propose a hybrid pulse position modulation/ultrashort light pulse code-division multiple-access (PPM/ULP-CDMA) system for ultrafast optical communications. The proposed system employs spectral CDMA encoding/decoding and PPM with very short pulse separation. The statistical properties of the encoded ULP are investigated with a general pulse model, and the performance of the proposed PPM/ULP-CDMA system is investigated. It is shown that we can improve upon the performance of other ULP-CDMA systems, such as those using on-off keying, by employing PPM. It is also shown that we can improve the performance of the proposed system by increasing the effective number of chips, by increasing the number of PPM symbols, and by reducing the ULP duration. The performance analysis shows that the aggregate throughput of the proposed PPM/ULP-CDMA system could be over 1 Tb/s.

The original paper presents an efficient algorithm for routing an Omega/sup -1//spl times/Omega nonblocking network. This comment presents an extra step required to mute an Omega+Omega network.