High-capacity transmission over multi-core fibers

The ultimate transmission capacity of standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) is limited by fiber nonlinearity which prevents increasing transmission power and finite amplifier bandwidth. In order to overcome such limitation, space-division multiplexing (SDM) has been proposed. Multi-core fiber (MCF) is a strong candidate to realize practical SDM transmission system because of high isolation of individual spatial modes sharing the same cladding, which enables ultra-high capacity transmission in cooperation with wide band WDM.