Abstract
AbstractThe pervasive digital economy, fueled by developments in datacenter networking and cloud/edge computing, relies ever increasingly on the implementation of short‐ to metro‐range high‐capacity, low‐latency optical communication links. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the low spectrally flat chromatic dispersion and ultralow nonlinearity possible in hollow‐core fibers (HCFs) compared to conventional solid‐core fibers offer significant potential for the transmission of intensity‐modulation and direct‐detection (IM‐DD) signals over 100‐km‐scale distances. Specifically, the longest HCF‐only IM‐DD wavelength‐division multiplexed (WDM) C‐band transmission experiments (>100km) without chromatic dispersion compensation to date are reported, achieving reach improvements of approximately 5 times and 2 times compared to using standard single‐mode fiber and non‐zero dispersion‐shifted fiber, respectively, in the same experimental recirculating loop set‐up. For >100‐km transmission, a significant >150‐µs latency reduction can be obtained using HCF. These results, in combination with recent progress in loss reduction in HCFs, indicate that such fibers present a promising route to the realization of simple, cost‐effective, high‐capacity, ultra‐low‐latency IM‐DD WDM transmission links with the potential to revolutionize optical networks in the years to come.
Highlights
The growth in significance of cloud/edge computing in recent years has placed particular emphasis on high-capacity optical links, the reach of which generally ranges from a few kilometres to around 100 kilometres, since moving the computation and data storage closer to the end user reduces response times and saves network bandwidth[1]-[2]
Our demonstration suggests a fundamentally different route to realising high-speed simple IMDD long-reach wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) fiber transmission at ultimate low-latency. We have validated this by experimentally comparing the transmission performance in a hollow-core nested antiresonant nodeless fiber (NANF) against that in standard singlemode fibers (SSMFs) and NZ-dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF). These proof-of-concept experiments were carried out in the C-band using an optical re-circulating loop, showing that reach improvements of ~5 and ~2 times can be achieved in the NANF relative to using the SSMF and nonzero DSF (NZ-DSF), respectively. 4×50-Gb/s and 4×100-Gb/s intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IM-DD) transmissions were demonstrated at transmission distances of about 143 km and 38 km, respectively
It was validated that the hollow-core fibers (HCFs)-based transmission can offer ~31% latency reduction compared to both SSMF and NZ-DSF, saving more than 150μs transmission time when the link distance is beyond 100 km
Summary
The growth in significance of cloud/edge computing in recent years has placed particular emphasis on high-capacity optical links, the reach of which generally ranges from a few kilometres to around 100 kilometres, since moving the computation and data storage closer to the end user reduces response times and saves network bandwidth[1]-[2]. Even though the lower transmission loss of SSMF/NZ-DSF would allow longer spans to be adopted in these fiber types, we opted instead for similar physical lengths, so that the effect of amplification noise would not be a factor in our comparison.
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