Includes bibliographical references

This book highlights the fundamental principles of optical fiber technology required for understanding modern high-capacity lightwave telecom networks. Such networks have become an indispensable part of society with applications ranging from simple web browsing to critical healthcare diagnosis and cloud computing. Since users expect these services to always be available, careful engineering is required in all technologies ranging from component development to network operations. To achieve this understanding, this book first presents a comprehensive treatment of various optical fiber structures and diverse photonic components used in optical fiber networks. Following this discussion is the fundamental design principles of digital and analog optical fiber transmission links. The concluding chapters present the architectures and performance characteristics of optical networks.