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Technology for Agile Coherent Transmission Architecture (TACOTA)
Overview
Coherent optical modulation and detection offers the highest degree of flexibility and agility in dynamic mobile networking environments and meeting future information transfer demands. Technology for Agile Coherent Transmission Architecture (TACOTA) strives to integrate state-of-the-art mixed-signal electronics and digital signal processing (DSP) technology into advanced coherent optical transmitter and receiver designs. TACOTA will also explore innovative, beyond state-of-art approaches in coherent optical frequency (wavelength) translation, with the intent to exploit the entire visible to mid-infrared (IR) spectral regions for high-capacity information transfer using digital waveforms commonly utilized in RF communications. Bandwidth-efficient, high-capacity modulation formats for in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) optical information encoding/decoding present appealing dynamic networking solutions as increased bandwidth-resolution digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) technologies become available. Agility in transmission spectral efficiency, as well as spectrally agile transmission capability, is important for free-space optical links in maintaining optimum information capacity, security, network robustness, and power management performance in dynamically changing network environments.
TACOTA develops and demonstrates the critical hardware components to realize this novel multi-spectral and agile coherent optical communications architecture. Although primarily a device/module technology development program, the individual TACOTA transmitter, receiver and wavelength converter goals and metrics are derived from attaining radically improved link performance. Free-space optical link performance goals include achieving a range of up to 100 km with an uncorrected BER of less than 10-3 at aggregate data rates that surpass 100 Gb/s in less than 50 GHz of optical bandwidth within the 1550 nm and 3800 nm wavelength regions.
Vision Statement
With a successful shift towards a netcentric architecture, the military will be able to detect anything, from anywhere, at any time, and globally share this information in real-time with high reliability and security. However, in doing so, a increased burden is placed on the military's communications systems. To unleash the full bandwidth potential of optics and provide seamless handoff with radio frequency (RF) technologies, the optical phase and frequency must be preserved and controlled in a similar manner as RF phase and frequency were in the twentieth century. The use of this coherent transmission, in addition to high-speed electronics and real-time digital signal processing (DSP), enables these next generation networks.