High-speed data transmission on an optical fiber using a byte-wide WDM system

The advantages and problems of using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to transmit byte-wide data in parallel through a single-mode optical fiber are studied. The principle problem which is particular to byte-wide transmission is shown to be bit skew caused by group delays of the different transmission wavelengths. The aggregate bit rate of the byte-wide link is shown to be equal to the aggregate bit rate of the serial link for all byte sizes.>