GUIDED TRANSMISSION MEDIA

GUIDED TRANSMISSION MEDIA

The purpose of the physical layer is to transport bits from one machine to another. Various physical media can be used for the actual transmission. Each one has its own niche in terms of bandwidth, delay, cost, and ease of installation and maintenance. Media are roughly grouped into guided media, such as copper wire and fiber optics, and unguided media, such as terrestrial wireless, satellite, and lasers through the air. We will look at guided media in this section, and unguided media in the next sections.

Magnetic Media

One of the most common ways to transport data from one computer to another is to write them onto magnetic tape or removable media (e.g., recordable DVDs), physically transport the tape or disks to the destination machine, and read them back in again. Although this method is not as sophisticated as using a geosynchronous communication satellite, it is often more cost effective, especially for applications in which high bandwidth or cost per bit transported is the key factor.

A simple calculation will make this point clear. An industry-standard Ultrium tape can hold 800 gigabytes. A box 60 × 60 × 60 cm can hold about 1000 of these tapes, for a total capacity of 800 terabytes, or 6400 terabits (6.4 petabits). A box of tapes can be delivered anywhere in the United States in 24 hours by Federal Express and other companies. The effective bandwidth of this transmission is 6400 terabits/86,400 sec, or a bit over 70 Gbps. If the destination is only an hour away by road, the bandwidth is increased to over 1700 Gbps. No computer network can even approach this. Of course, networks are getting faster, but tape densities are increasing, too

If we now look at cost, we get a similar picture. The cost of an Ultrium tape is around $40 when bought in bulk. A tape can be reused at least 10 times, so thetape cost is maybe $4000 per box per usage. Add to this another $1000 for shipping (probably much less), and we have a cost of roughly $5000 to ship 800 TB. This amounts to shipping a gigabyte for a little over half a cent. No network can beat that. The moral of the story is:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

Twisted Pairs

Although the bandwidth characteristics of magnetic tape are excellent, the delay characteristics are poor. Transmission time is measured in minutes or hours, not milliseconds. For many applications an online connection is needed. One of the oldest and still most common transmission media is twisted pair. A twisted pair consists of two insulated copper wires, typically about 1 mm thick. The wires are twisted together in a helical form, just like a DNA molecule. Twisting is done because two parallel wires constitute a fine antenna. When the wires are twisted, the waves from different twists cancel out, so the wire radiates less effectively. A signal is usually carried as the difference in voltage between the two wires in the pair. This provides better immunity to external noise because the noise tends to affect both wires the same, leaving the differential unchanged.

The most common application of the twisted pair is the telephone system. Nearly all telephones are connected to the telephone company (telco) office by a twisted pair. Both telephone calls and ADSL Internet access run over these lines. Twisted pairs can run several kilometers without amplification, but for longer distances the signal becomes too attenuated and repeaters are needed. When many twisted pairs run in parallel for a substantial distance, such as all the wires coming from an apartment building to the telephone company office, they are bundled together and encased in a protective sheath. The pairs in these bundles would interfere with one another if it were not for the twisting. In parts of the world where telephone lines run on poles above ground, it is common to see bundles several centimeters in diameter.

Twisted pairs can be used for transmitting either analog or digital information. The bandwidth depends on the thickness of the wire and the distance traveled, but several megabits/sec can be achieved for a few kilometers in many cases. Due to their adequate performance and low cost, twisted pairs are widely used and are likely to remain so for years to come.

Twisted pairs can be used for transmitting either analog or digital information. The bandwidth depends on the thickness of the wire and the distance traveled, but several megabits/sec can be achieved for a few kilometers in many cases. Due to their adequate performance and low cost, twisted pairs are widely used and are likely to remain so for years to come.

Different LAN standards may use the twisted pairs differently. For example, 100-Mbps Ethernet uses two (out of the four) pairs, one pair for each direction.

 To reach higher speeds, 1-Gbps Ethernet uses all four pairs in both directions simultaneously; this requires the receiver to factor out the signal that is transmitted locally.

Some general terminology is now in order. Links that can be used in both directions at the same time, like a two-lane road, are called full-duplex links. In contrast, links that can be used in either direction, but only one way at a time, like a single-track railroad line. are called half-duplex links. A third category consists of links that allow traffic in only one direction, like a one-way street. They are called simplex links.

Returning to twisted pair, Cat 5 replaced earlier Category 3 cables with a similar cable that uses the same connector, but has more twists per meter. More twists result in less crosstalk and a better-quality signal over longer distances, making the cables more suitable for high-speed computer communication, especially 100-Mbps and 1-Gbps Ethernet LANs.

New wiring is more likely to be Category 6 or even Category 7. These categories has more stringent specifications to handle signals with greater bandwidths. Some cables in Category 6 and above are rated for signals of 500 MHz and can support the 10-Gbps links that will soon be deployed.

Through Category 6, these wiring types are referred to as UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) as they consist simply of wires and insulators. In contrast to these, Category 7 cables have shielding on the individual twisted pairs, as well as around the entire cable (but inside the plastic protective sheath). Shielding reduces the susceptibility to external interference and crosstalk with other nearby cables to meet demanding performance specifications. The cables are reminiscent of the high-quality, but bulky and expensive shielded twisted pair cables that IBM introduced in the early 1980s, but which did not prove popular outside of IBM installations. Evidently, it is time to try again.

Coaxial Cable

Another common transmission medium is the coaxial cable (known to its many friends as just ‘‘coax’’ and pronounced ‘‘co-ax’’). It has better shielding and greater bandwidth than unshielded twisted pairs, so it can span longer distances athigher speeds. Two kinds of coaxial cable are widely used. One kind, 50-ohm cable, is commonly used when it is intended for digital transmission from the start. The other kind, 75-ohm cable, is commonly used for analog transmission and cable television. This distinction is based on historical, rather than technical, factors (e.g., early dipole antennas had an impedance of 300 ohms, and it was easy to use existing 4:1 impedance-matching transformers). Starting in the mid1990s, cable TV operators began to provide Internet access over cable, which has made 75-ohm cable more important for data communication.

A coaxial cable consists of a stiff copper wire as the core, surrounded by an insulating material. The insulator is encased by a cylindrical conductor, often as a closely woven braided mesh. The outer conductor is covered in a protective plastic sheath. A cutaway view of a coaxial cable is shown in Fig. 2-4.

The construction and shielding of the coaxial cable give it a good combination of high bandwidth and excellent noise immunity. The bandwidth possible depends on the cable quality and length. Modern cables have a bandwidth of up to a few GHz. Coaxial cables used to be widely used within the telephone system for long-distance lines but have now largely been replaced by fiber optics on longhaul routes. Coax is still widely used for cable television and metropolitan area networks, however.

Power Lines

The telephone and cable television networks are not the only sources of wiring that can be reused for data communication. There is a yet more common kind of wiring: electrical power lines. Power lines deliver electrical power to houses, and electrical wiring within houses distributes the power to electrical outlets.

The use of power lines for data communication is an old idea. Power lines have been used by electricity companies for low-rate communication such as remote metering for many years, as well in the home to control devices (e.g., the X10 standard). In recent years there has been renewed interest in high-rate communication over these lines, both inside the home as a LAN and outside the homefor broadband Internet access. We will concentrate on the most common scenario: using electrical wires inside the home.

The convenience of using power lines for networking should be clear. Simply plug a TV and a receiver into the wall, which you must do anyway because they need power, and they can send and receive movies over the electrical wiring. This configuration is shown in Fig. 2-5. There is no other plug or radio. The data signal is superimposed on the low-frequency power signal (on the active or ‘‘hot’’ wire) as both signals use the wiring at the same time.

The difficulty with using household electrical wiring for a network is that it was designed to distribute power signals. This task is quite different than distributing data signals, at which household wiring does a horrible job. Electrical signals are sent at 50–60 Hz and the wiring attenuates the much higher frequency (MHz) signals needed for high-rate data communication. The electrical properties of the wiring vary from one house to the next and change as appliances are turned on and off, which causes data signals to bounce around the wiring. Transient currents when appliances switch on and off create electrical noise over a wide range of frequencies. And without the careful twisting of twisted pairs, electrical wiring acts as a fine antenna, picking up external signals and radiating signals of its own. This behavior means that to meet regulatory requirements, the data signal must exclude licensed frequencies such as the amateur radio bands.

Despite these difficulties, it is practical to send at least 100 Mbps over typical household electrical wiring by using communication schemes that resist impaired frequencies and bursts of errors. Many products use various proprietary standards for power-line networking, so international standards are actively under development.

Fiber Optics

Many people in the computer industry take enormous pride in how fast computer technology is improving as it follows Moore’s law, which predicts a doubling of the number of transistors per chip roughly every two years (Schaller,1997). The original (1981) IBM PC ran at a clock speed of 4.77 MHz. Twentyeight years later, PCs could run a four-core CPU at 3 GHz. This increase is a gain of a factor of around 2500, or 16 per decade. Impressive.

In the same period, wide area communication links went from 45 Mbps (a T3 line in the telephone system) to 100 Gbps (a modern long distance line). This gain is similarly impressive, more than a factor of 2000 and close to 16 per decade, while at the same time the error rate went from 10−5 per bit to almost zero. Furthermore, single CPUs are beginning to approach physical limits, which is why it is now the number of CPUs that is being increased per chip. In contrast, the achievable bandwidth with fiber technology is in excess of 50,000 Gbps (50 Tbps) and we are nowhere near reaching these limits. The current practical limit of around 100 Gbps is due to our inability to convert between electrical and optical signals any faster. To build higher-capacity links, many channels are simply carried in parallel over a single fiber.

In this section we will study fiber optics to learn how that transmission technology works. In the ongoing race between computing and communication, communication may yet win because of fiber optic networks. The implication of this would be essentially infinite bandwidth and a new conventional wisdom that computers are hopelessly slow so that networks should try to avoid computation at all costs, no matter how much bandwidth that wastes. This change will take a while to sink in to a generation of computer scientists and engineers taught to think in terms of the low Shannon limits imposed by copper.

Of course, this scenario does not tell the whole story because it does not include cost. The cost to install fiber over the last mile to reach consumers and bypass the low bandwidth of wires and limited availability of spectrum is tremendous. It also costs more energy to move bits than to compute. We may always have islands of inequities where either computation or communication is essentially free. For example, at the edge of the Internet we throw computation and storage at the problem of compressing and caching content, all to make better use of Internet access links. Within the Internet, we may do the reverse, with companies such as Google moving huge amounts of data across the network to where it is cheaper to store or compute on it.

Fiber optics are used for long-haul transmission in network backbones, highspeed LANs (although so far, copper has always managed catch up eventually), and high-speed Internet access such as FttH (Fiber to the Home). An optical transmission system has three key components: the light source, the transmission medium, and the detector. Conventionally, a pulse of light indicates a 1 bit and the absence of light indicates a 0 bit. The transmission medium is an ultra-thin fiber of glass. The detector generates an electrical pulse when light falls on it. By attaching a light source to one end of an optical fiber and a detector to the other, we have a unidirectional data transmission system that accepts an electrical signal, converts and transmits it by light pulses, and then reconverts the output to an electrical signal at the receiving end.

This transmission system would leak light and be useless in practice were it not for an interesting principle of physics. When a light ray passes from one medium to another—for example, from fused silica to air—the ray is refracted (bent) at the silica/air boundary, as shown in Fig. 2-6(a). Here we see a light ray incident on the boundary at an angle α1 emerging at an angle β1. The amount of refraction depends on the properties of the two media (in particular, their indices of refraction). For angles of incidence above a certain critical value, the light is refracted back into the silica; none of it escapes into the air. Thus, a light ray incident at or above the critical angle is trapped inside the fiber, as shown in Fig. 2-6(b), and can propagate for many kilometers with virtually no loss.

 The sketch of Fig. 2-6(b) shows only one trapped ray, but since any light ray incident on the boundary above the critical angle will be reflected internally, many different rays will be bouncing around at different angles. Each ray is said to have a different mode, so a fiber having this property is called a multimode fiber.

However, if the fiber’s diameter is reduced to a few wavelengths of light the fiber acts like a wave guide and the light can propagate only in a straight line, without bouncing, yielding a single-mode fiber. Single-mode fibers are more expensive but are widely used for longer distances. Currently available single-mode fibers can transmit data at 100 Gbps for 100 km without amplification. Even higher data rates have been achieved in the laboratory for shorter distances.

Transmission of Light Through Fiber

Optical fibers are made of glass, which, in turn, is made from sand, an inexpensive raw material available in unlimited amounts. Glassmaking was known to the ancient Egyptians, but their glass had to be no more than 1 mm thick or the light could not shine through. Glass transparent enough to be useful for windows was developed during the Renaissance. The glass used for modern optical fibers is so transparent that if the oceans were full of it instead of water, the seabed would be as visible from the surface as the ground is from an airplane on a clear day.

The attenuation of light through glass depends on the wavelength of the light (as well as on some physical properties of the glass). It is defined as the ratio of input to output signal power. For the kind of glass used in fibers, the attenuation is shown in Fig. 2-7 in units of decibels per linear kilometer of fiber. For example, a factor of two loss of signal power gives an attenuation of 10 log10 2 = 3 dB. The figure shows the near-infrared part of the spectrum, which is what is used in practice. Visible light has slightly shorter wavelengths, from 0.4 to 0.7 microns. (1 micron is 10−6 meters.) The true metric purist would refer to these wavelengths as 400 nm to 700 nm, but we will stick with traditional usage.

Three wavelength bands are most commonly used at present for optical communication. They are centered at 0.85, 1.30, and 1.55 microns, respectively. All three bands are 25,000 to 30,000 GHz wide. The 0.85-micron band was used first. It has higher attenuation and so is used for shorter distances, but at that wavelength the lasers and electronics could be made from the same material (gallium arsenide). The last two bands have good attenuation properties (less than 5% loss per kilometer). The 1.55-micron band is now widely used with erbium-doped amplifiers that work directly in the optical domain.

Light pulses sent down a fiber spread out in length as they propagate. This spreading is called chromatic dispersion. The amount of it is wavelength dependent. One way to keep these spread-out pulses from overlapping is to increase the distance between them, but this can be done only by reducing the signaling rate. Fortunately, it has been discovered that making the pulses in a special shape related to the reciprocal of the hyperbolic cosine causes nearly all the dispersion effects cancel out, so it is possible to send pulses for thousands of kilometers without appreciable shape distortion. These pulses are called solitons. A considerable amount of research is going on to take solitons out of the lab and into the field.

Fiber Cables

Fiber optic cables are similar to coax, except without the braid. Figure 2-8(a) shows a single fiber viewed from the side. At the center is the glass core through which the light propagates. In multimode fibers, the core is typically 50 microns in diameter, about the thickness of a human hair. In single-mode fibers, the core is 8 to 10 microns.

The core is surrounded by a glass cladding with a lower index of refraction than the core, to keep all the light in the core. Next comes a thin plastic jacket to protect the cladding. Fibers are typically grouped in bundles, protected by an outer sheath. Figure 2-8(b) shows a sheath with three fibers.

Terrestrial fiber sheaths are normally laid in the ground within a meter of the surface, where they are occasionally subject to attacks by backhoes or gophers. Near the shore, transoceanic fiber sheaths are buried in trenches by a kind of seaplow. In deep water, they just lie on the bottom, where they can be snagged by fishing trawlers or attacked by giant squid.

Fibers can be connected in three different ways. First, they can terminate in connectors and be plugged into fiber sockets. Connectors lose about 10 to 20% of the light, but they make it easy to reconfigure systems.

Second, they can be spliced mechanically. Mechanical splices just lay the two carefully cut ends next to each other in a special sleeve and clamp them in place. Alignment can be improved by passing light through the junction and then making small adjustments to maximize the signal. Mechanical splices take trained personnel about 5 minutes and result in a 10% light loss. 

Third, two pieces of fiber can be fused (melted) to form a solid connection. A fusion splice is almost as good as a single drawn fiber, but even here, a small amount of attenuation occurs.

For all three kinds of splices, reflections can occur at the point of the splice, and the reflected energy can interfere with the signal.

Two kinds of light sources are typically used to do the signaling. These are LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) and semiconductor lasers. They have different properties, as shown in Fig. 2-9. They can be tuned in wavelength by inserting Fabry-Perot or Mach-Zehnder interferometers between the source and the fiber. Fabry-Perot interferometers are simple resonant cavities consisting of two parallel mirrors. The light is incident perpendicular to the mirrors. The length of the cavity selects out those wavelengths that fit inside an integral number of times. Mach-Zehnder interferometers separate the light into two beams. The two beams travel slightly different distances. They are recombined at the end and are in phase for only certain wavelengths.

The receiving end of an optical fiber consists of a photodiode, which gives off an electrical pulse when struck by light. The response time of photodiodes, which convert the signal from the optical to the electrical domain, limits data rates to about 100 Gbps. Thermal noise is also an issue, so a pulse of light must carry enough energy to be detected. By making the pulses powerful enough, the error rate can be made arbitrarily small.

Comparison of Fiber Optics and Copper Wire

It is instructive to compare fiber to copper. Fiber has many advantages. To start with, it can handle much higher bandwidths than copper. This alone would require its use in high-end networks. Due to the low attenuation, repeaters are needed only about every 50 km on long lines, versus about every 5 km for copper, resulting in a big cost saving. Fiber also has the advantage of not being affected by power surges, electromagnetic interference, or power failures. Nor is it affected by corrosive chemicals in the air, important for harsh factory environments.

Oddly enough, telephone companies like fiber for a different reason: it is thin and lightweight. Many existing cable ducts are completely full, so there is no room to add new capacity. Removing all the copper and replacing it with fiber empties the ducts, and the copper has excellent resale value to copper refiners who see it as very high-grade ore. Also, fiber is much lighter than copper. One thousand twisted pairs 1 km long weigh 8000 kg. Two fibers have more capacity and weigh only 100 kg, which reduces the need for expensive mechanical support systems that must be maintained. For new routes, fiber wins hands down due to its much lower installation cost. Finally, fibers do not leak light and are difficult to tap. These properties give fiber good security against potential wiretappers.

On the downside, fiber is a less familiar technology requiring skills not all engineers have, and fibers can be damaged easily by being bent too much. Since optical transmission is inherently unidirectional, two-way communication requires either two fibers or two frequency bands on one fiber. Finally, fiber interfaces cost more than electrical interfaces. Nevertheless, the future of all fixed data communication over more than short distances is clearly with fiber. For a discussion of all aspects of fiber optics and their networks, see Hecht (2005).

Frequently Asked Questions