The purpose of OPTICS 2010, the International Conference on Optical Communication Systems, is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested on any of the optical communication components of an optical communication system, or the system itself. An optical communication system consists of a transmitter, which encodes a message into an optical signal, a channel, which carries the signal to its destination, and a receiver, which reproduces the message from the received optical signal.
Optical fiber is the most common type of channel for optical communications, although other types of optical waveguides are used within communication networks.
The transmitters in optical fiber links are generally light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or laser diodes. The signal encoding is typically simple intensity modulation, although historically optical phase and frequency modulation have been demonstrated in the lab.