Terabit WSDM Optical Access Network Using Multicore Fibers and Advanced Modulation Formats

• Main Authors: Liu, S., Feng, Z., Li, B., Wang, R., Xu, Z., Shum, Perry Ping, Lin, R., Tang, M., Fu, S., Tong, W.
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: Electromagnetics Research
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/81726; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/39611; https://piers.org/piersproceedings/piers2015PragueProc.php?start=450
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

We proposed a hybrid wavelength-space division multiplexing (WSDM) optical access network architecture utilizing multicore fibers (MCFs) with advanced modulation formats. As a proof of concept, we experimentally demonstrated a WSDM optical access network with duplex transmission using our developed and fabricated multicore (7-core) fibers and fan-in/fan-out device with 58.7 km distance. With QPSK-OFDM modulation format, the aggregation downstream (DS) capacity reaches 250 Gb/s using 5 outer cores and it can be further scaled to 1 Tb/s using 16 QAM-OFDM. For upstream (US) transmission, wavelengths seeded from DS using the inner core are modulated with DMT signal adapted with the channel conditions and then transmitted back to the OLT through the 6th outer core. As an emulation of high speed mobile backhaul (MB) transmission, IQ modulated PDM-QPSK signal with 48 Gb/s per wavelength is transmitted in the inner core of MCF and coherently detected in the OLT side. Both DS and US optical signal exhibit acceptable performance with sufficient power budget.