PhD thesis Optical communications

About Bell Labs

Often referred to as “The Idea Factory” or “The Crown Jewel,” Nokia Bell Labs has an unparalleled history of innovation output since 1920’s up to now. Researchers at Nokia Bell Labs have been behind or involved in many critical technological milestones for the last century. We built the first lasers and transistors, created C and C++, discovered the origins of the universe, proved the wave-like behavior of electron in the lab, and connected the world using communications satellites. We also invented implementable technologies like the solar battery and the first hearing aids and made great theoretical leaps forward with the likes of Information Theory. For more information on who we are, and reading about our history, including 10 Nobel Laureates to-date, please have a look at About us - Nokia Bell Labs (bell-labs.com). 

The proposed PhD thesis will be held in the Optical Transmission Department, as part of the Optical Systems and Devices Research lab of Nokia Bell Labs. The Optical Transmission Department, located in the vibrant center of Massy, 10 km south of Paris, has a long track-record of innovation in advanced models of transmission effects and breakthrough hero experiments in the field of highspeed and long-haul fiber-optic transmission systems.

About the PhD thesis

Thanks to the innovations in the past decade, most importantly high-performance coherent transceivers, and PCS modulation formats we have essentially reached the Shannon capacity on a single-mode fiber strand, while the exponential demand for data traffic is maintained and is expected to even accelerate in future. To meet these demands parallelism in space and bandwidth are inevitable. On the component side, substantial research effort is being devoted to spatial-division multiplexing (SDM) and ultra-wide band (UWB) amplification schemes to realize spatial and spectral parallelism. In this new context joint resource optimization in optical networks is mandatory to handle and control many degrees of freedom and to avoid unnecessary ‘worst case’ margins which rapidly add up. We can build upon currently available accurate models for various components, e.g., linear and nonlinear DSP operation, linear and nonlinear channel model corresponding to various types of fibers, as well as elaborate model for different amplification schemes, and sensing technology, to develop efficient digital twins of a realistic optical network, and then define meaningful loss functions (e.g. minimizing total system cost or energy consumption) and constraints (e.g. meeting a minimum required traffic matrix) and try to solve the resulting optimization problem.  The good news is that the available high-performance computing and machine-learning technologies of today are sufficiently powerful to allow for tackling optimization problems of this type and scale in reasonable time. 

The candidate is accountable for carrying out the research efforts required to achieve highly accurate and fast advanced models for optical networks.

Master of Science in Optical communications and/or Electrical engineering, particularly mastering both classical nonlinear models (i.e. numerical integration) and novel AI-based techniques to accelerate classical computation.

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