Impairment Compensation for Fiber-Optic Networks

To compensate for disturbances and distortions in fiber-optic networks, industry has so far relied on digital signal processors. However, these processors are extremely power-hungry and, for example in optical plug-in modules, account for almost 50 percent of the power budget. Additionally, their size creates challenges for heat dissipation and miniaturization. This not only complicates integration into edge devices but also drives up operating costs.

By contrast, a significantly more effective, sustainable, and cost-efficient solution is impairment compensation via spiking neural networks (SNNs). They process information in an event-driven manner and can respond immediately to deviations or anomalies. When monitoring communication channels, SNNs can leverage this strength to detect disturbances in real time and compensate them using control parameters with only minimal energy consumption.

For industry, this means lower costs, higher data rates, and fiber-optic communication that gains overall resilience.

The AI boom is also affecting the physical infrastructure: more and more powerful data centers are being planned and built to train large AI models using massive amounts of data. For information to be reliably processed within a data center, fiber-optic networks are necessary to transmit data at maximum speed and with minimal latency.

But the requirements are currently evolving faster than the technical solutions – especially the optical transceivers in fiber networks are reaching their physical limits. In addition, increasing amounts of waste heat are generated that cannot be fully dissipated, further degrading signal quality. 

Spiking neural networks can counteract this with impairment compensation: they compensate disturbances, maintain the performance of signal transmission in optical transceivers, and extend their lifetimes. With their enormous energy efficiency, SNNs also help data center operators, who, in the face of rising power consumption and complex cooling systems, want to curb exploding operating costs.