In this paper, we introduce advanced undergraduate communication engineering students to the newest research papers in the optical communications field. An elective course named ‘Selected Topics in Communications’ offered to final year students in Electronics and Communication department, faculty of Engineering, Arab Academy for Science and Technology (AAST), Egypt, focuses on free space optics (FSO). The course objective is to equip students with the necessary theoretical models and the practical knowledge of free FSO from the most recent research. The course studies the current FSO capabilities, constraints, challenges and applications both indoors and outdoors in atmospheric, space and underwater channels. The main prerequisite to the course is digital communications due to the dependence on optical technology on high speed transmission and different modulation techniques in order to achieve best performance. In lectures, we define what a paper is and identify their different types. We explain the difference between conferences and journals, the reviewing process and their requirements. Lectures include how to read and write a technical research paper. Such lectures are to familiarize students with the construction of a paper, how is it organized how to scan for certain information and read results. In tutorials, students practice on different research papers and extract required information according to prepared question sheets. At least 25% of the course marks are dedicated to research papers. Lecturers pick an unknown paper for examination. On the other, students are required to perform a paper presentation after choosing a recent paper on a certain topic.
Turbulence plays an important role in investigating the irradiance scintillation index (SI) for a free-space optical wave propagating through atmospheric turbulence. The Hufnagel–Valley model is used in most studies, where the SI of the slant path is obtained using numerical analysis. A polynomial is proposed for the refractive index structure parameter, on which a closed form is derived for the irradiance SI of a spherical optical wave propagating through a slant atmospheric turbulence. This is used to study signal-to-noise ratio and bit error rate for system performance evaluation. The obtained results demonstrate the simplicity of using the derived closed form of SI compared to statistical methods. The derived expression takes less computational time for SI, which reflects positively on the system performance, which is an essential issue in vehicular mobile applications, in particular.
All-optical logic gates are designed to extend the existing design to a higher number of bits, to use the same gate in multifunctions, and to add new gate designs. This type of gate is based on semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) nonlinearities, since the SOA can provide a strong change of the refractive index together with high gain. The SOA is used with a Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) forming an SOA-MZI structure which is used to perform the logic gates XOR, NOR, OR, and XNOR. Two binary input data signals are used with different number of bits (4, 6, 8, and 16 bit) at 10 Gbps. This work includes the study of the effect of the number of bits on the received power, minimum bit error rate, and maximum Q-factor.
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