Abstract

Bidirectional transmission in a multicore fiber (MCF) reduces core-to-core crosstalk, changing optimal MCF design and multicore submarine cable systems, compared with conventional unidirectional transmission systems. We first demonstrate analytically the increase in capacity with bidirectional transmission in submarine systems. From the perspective of the capacity of one MCF, we show that bidirectional transmission enables an optimum design based on a 6-core MCF with a standard cladding diameter, taking advantage of the reduction of XT. For multicore submarine cable systems, we demonstrate that 6-core MCF systems with bidirectional transmission offer the highest cable capacity for regional Asian systems in the range of 3,000 km. We further discuss a multicore erbium doped fiber amplifier (MC-EDFA) system even for bidirectional transmission to improve the energy efficiency in submarine systems, and we show that 6-core MCF systems offer the highest capacity up to 6,000 km because of MC-EDFA. We also show a 10 $\%$ larger capacity for a 3,000 km 6-core MCF system, and 43 $\%$ larger capacity for a 9,000 km 4-core MCF system in bidirectional transmission with MC-EDFA, compared with the conventional repeater amplifier in FIFO devices. In addition, we investigated the potential increase in the cable capacity with the future cable system assumption, especially concerning cable supply voltage.

First demonstration of MC-EDFA-repeatered SDM transmission of 40 x 128-Gbit/s PDM-QPSK signals per core over 6,160-km 7-core MCF

H. Takahashi, T. Tsuritani, E. L. T. de Gabory, T. Ito, W. R. Peng, K. Igarashi, K. Takeshima, Y. Kawaguchi, I. Morita, Y. Tsuchida, Y. Mimura, K. Maeda, T. Saito, K. Watanabe, K. Imamura, R. Sugizaki, and M. Suzuki
Opt. Express 21(1) 789-795 (2013)

Theoretical investigations of weakly- and strongly-coupled multi-core fibers for the applications of optical submarine communications under power and fiber count limits

Lin Sun, Junwei Zhang, Gai Zhou, Bin Chen, Gordon Ning Liu, Yi Cai, Zhaohui Li, Chao Lu, and Gangxiang Shen
Opt. Express 31(3) 4615-4629 (2023)

19-core MCF transmission system using EDFA with shared core pumping coupled via free-space optics

Jun Sakaguchi, Werner Klaus, Benjamin J. Puttnam, José Manuel Delgado Mendinueta, Yoshinari Awaji, Naoya Wada, Yukihiro Tsuchida, Koichi Maeda, Masateru Tadakuma, Katsunori Imamura, Ryuichi Sugizaki, Tetsuya Kobayashi, Yusaku Tottori, Masayuki Watanabe, and R. V. Jensen
Opt. Express 22(1) 90-95 (2014)

Multicore Fibers for High-Capacity Submarine Transmission Systems

Md. Nooruzzaman and Toshio Morioka
J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 10(2) A175-A184 (2018)

Single-wavelength bidirectional 4-core MCF self-homodyne coherent link

Aboobackkar Sidhique, Shekhar Saxena, Pramod Mishra, Surya Karmakar, Arvind Mishra, and Shalabh Gupta
Appl. Opt. 63(3) 810-815 (2024)