A multi-core or multi-fiber WDM system

A multi-core or multi-fiber architecture with interleaver at the fiber input and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) demultiplexer at the fiber output is proposed. In this architecture, different channels of a WDM system are interleaved into different cores of a multi-core fiber, and therefore, the inter-channel nonlinear impairments are suppressed. It is shown that for a 39-span system, the 4-fiber or 4-core system with negligible crosstalk outperforms the single-core system by 2.2 dBQ20. The impact of crosstalk between cores of a multi-core fiber (MCF) on the system performance is studied.