Long distance transmission in few-mode fibers

Fatih Yaman,Benyuan Zhu,Neng Bai,Guifang Li,Ting Wang

doi:10.1364/oe.18.013250

Abstract

Using multimode fibers for long-haul transmission is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. In particular few-mode fibers (FMFs) are demonstrated as a good compromise since they are sufficiently resistant to mode coupling compared to standard multimode fibers but they still can have large core diameters compared to single-mode fibers. As a result these fibers can have significantly less nonlinearity and at the same time they can have the same performance as single-mode fibers in terms of dispersion and loss. In the absence of mode coupling it is possible to use these fibers in the single-mode operation where all the data is carried in only one of the spatial modes throughout the fiber. It is shown experimentally that the single-mode operation is achieved simply by splicing single-mode fibers to both ends of a 35-km-long dual-mode fiber at 1310 nm. After 35 km of transmission, no modal dispersion or excess loss was observed. Finally the same fiber is placed in a recirculating loop and 3 WDM channels each carrying 6 Gb/s BPSK data were transmitted through 1050 km of the few-mode fiber without modal dispersion.

Highlights

In particular few-mode fibers (FMFs) are demonstrated as a good compromise since they are sufficiently resistant to mode coupling compared to standard multimode fibers but they still can have large core diameters compared to single-mode fibers
It is demonstrated with an experiment that this can be achieved with no penalty due to modal dispersion or excess loss, providing single-mode fiber performance with the low nonlinearity advantage of multimode fiber
Using dispersion maps [12], more nonlinearity tolerant modulation formats such as DPSK [13,14], or amplification schemes such as Raman amplification [14], designing fibers with large effective area [2,3], and recently compensating nonlinear impairments using digital signal processing (DSP) techniques [15,16] are among the methods used

Summary

Introduction

Recommended Citation Yaman, Fatih; Bai, Neng; Zhu, Benyuan; Wang, Ting; and Li, Guifang, "Long distance transmission in fewmode fibers" (2010). As a result these fibers can have significantly less nonlinearity and at the same time they can have the same performance as single-mode fibers in terms of dispersion and loss. D. Donlagic, “A low bending loss multimode fiber transmission system,” Opt. Express 17(24), 22081–22095 (2009).

Results

Conclusion