Highly Spectral Efficient C + L-Band Transmission Over a 38-Core-3-Mode Fiber
Georg Rademacher, Benjamin J. Puttnam, Ruben S. Lúıs, Jun Sakaguchi, Werner Klaus, Tobias A. Eriksson, Yoshinari Awaji, Tetsuya Hayashi, Takuji Nagashima, Tetsuya Nakanishi, Toshiki Taru, Taketoshi Takahata, T. Kobayashi, Hideaki Furukawa, Naoya Wada
Abstract
High capacity transmission with a data rate over 10.66 Pb/s is demonstrated in a 13 km, 38-core-3-mode few-mode multi-core fiber. This was achieved with a single optical comb source to generate 368 × 24.5 GBaud 64- or 256-quadrature-amplitude-modulated signals in a 25 GHz wavelength channel grid in combination with a few-mode multi-core fiber with high uniformity amongst cores. We investigated essential transmission channel characteristics and found that mode-dependent loss strongly decreases the achievable data rates in some cores, while we did not observe a correlation between varying impulse response spread and data rate. We further did not find an influence of the (radial) position of a core within the cladding on the data rate. Finally, we explored the potential of multi-span transmission over the same fiber with transmission distances up to 65 km, showing a strong performance penalty from prototype components with sub-optimal transmission properties.