257-Tbit/s Weakly Coupled 10-Mode C + L-Band WDM Transmission

TLDR

The technique mitigates MIMO processing burden in high‑order few‑mode fiber transmission. The study proposes partial MIMO‑based weakly coupled mode‑division multiplexing to reduce the MIMO matrix size. The authors employ partial MIMO‑based weakly coupled MDM transmission to shrink the MIMO matrix size. Modal cross‑talk is suppressed over the C+L band using a weakly coupled FMF and a highly mode‑selective multiplexer/demultiplexer; 10‑mode 336‑WDM dual‑carrier 12‑Gbaud dual‑polarization‑quadrature phase‑shift keying signals are transmitted over 48‑km weakly coupled FMF with only 2×2 or 4×4 partial MIMOs, achieving a record 257 Tbps capacity and 30.5 bit/s/Hz spectral efficiency.

Abstract

Partial multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-based weakly coupled mode-division multiplexing (MDM) transmission is proposed to reduce the MIMO matrix size in MDM. This technique can mitigate the burden of MIMO processing for high-order few-mode fiber (FMF) transmission. In this paper, we first show that modal XT can be sufficiently suppressed over the C+L band using a weakly coupled FMF and a highly mode-selective multiplexer/demultiplexer. Next, 10-mode-multiplexed 336-WDM transmission of dual-carrier 12-Gbaud dual-polarization-quadrature phase-shift keying signals over a 48-km weakly coupled FMF using only 2 × 2 or 4 × 4 partial MIMOs is demonstrated. To the best of our knowledge, in this experiment, we achieved a record fiber capacity of 257 Tbps with an aggregate spectral efficiency of 30.5 bit/s/Hz in single-core fiber transmission.