RESUMEN
Data rates in optical fiber networks have increased exponentially over the past decades and core-networks are expected to operate in the peta-bit-per-second regime by 2030. As current single-mode fiber-based transmission systems are reaching their capacity limits, space-division multiplexing has been investigated as a means to increase the per-fiber capacity. Of all space-division multiplexing fibers proposed to date, multi-mode fibers have the highest spatial channel density, as signals traveling in orthogonal fiber modes share the same fiber-core. By combining a high mode-count multi-mode fiber with wideband wavelength-division multiplexing, we report a peta-bit-per-second class transmission demonstration in multi-mode fibers. This was enabled by combining three key technologies: a wideband optical comb-based transmitter to generate highly spectral efficient 64-quadrature-amplitude modulated signals between 1528 nm and 1610 nm wavelength, a broadband mode-multiplexer, based on multi-plane light conversion, and a 15-mode multi-mode fiber with optimized transmission characteristics for wideband operation.
RESUMEN
For cost and design simplicity, various optical network architectures have been proposed in which downstream traffic from the optical line terminal to the optical networking unit is transmitted by carriers in the 1550 nm window, and upstream traffic by those in the 1300 nm window. A new generation of multimode fiber (MMF) has been designed to accommodate this requirement and to address technical challenges associated with fiber coupling. By restricting the number of modes at both fiber input and output, using off-the-shelf single-mode transceivers, single-wavelength 40 Gbit/s data transmission over a 1 km broad wavelength window multimode fiber has been demonstrated with only a 1.5 dB power penalty. The capacity in this new class of MMF is expected to increase with conventional technologies in single-mode fiber such as wavelength-division multiplexing and polarization multiplexing.
