Abstract

Since optical submarine cable systems are a part of the global communications infrastructure, their total capacity must be continuously and dramatically enlarged. Recently, methods how to maximize the transmission capacity under electrical power limitations have been studied, and it has been reported that a single band (C-band only) transmission system with more fiber pairs (FPs) could be a promising technology. This finding has triggered work on submarine cables with more FPs. For a further increase in FPs in optical submarine cable systems, which also have space limitations in existing cable designs, space-division multiplexing (SDM) technologies such as multi-core fibers (MCFs) and multi-mode fibers (MMFs) could be promising solutions. In particular, 125-μm standard cladding SDM fibers are attractive for early deployment in submarine cable systems since they are expected to have high productivity and high mechanical reliability similar to existing single-mode fibers (SMFs) with the same cladding diameter. In this paper, we report transpacific MCF transmission over a 30-nm bandwidth using standard cladding ultralow-loss coupled 4-core fibers, extending our previous work. The Q²-factors of 608 (4 core × 152 WDM) SDM/WDM channels modulated with 24-Gbaud DP (dual polarization)-QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying) exceeded the assumed forward error correction (FEC) limits after a 9,150-km transmission. As a result, transmission capacity of 50.47 Tbit/s and a capacity-distance product of 461.8 Pbit/s·km were achieved for standard cladding diameter SDM fibers.

Trans-Pacific class transmission over a standard cladding ultralow-loss 4-core fiber

Daiki Soma, Shohei Beppu, Yuta Wakayama, Seiya Sumita, Hidenori Takahashi, Noboru Yoshikane, Itsuro Morita, Takehiro Tsuritani, and Masatoshi Suzuki
Opt. Express 30(6) 9482-9493 (2022)

110.9-Tbit/s SDM transmission over 6,370 km using a full C-band seven-core EDFA

Koji Igarashi, Koki Takeshima, Takehiro Tsuritani, Hidenori Takahashi, Seiya Sumita, Itsuro Morita, Yukihiro Tsuchida, Masateru Tadakuma, Koichi Maeda, Tsunetoshi Saito, Kengo Watanabe, Katsunori Imamura, Ryuichi Sugizaki, and Masatoshi Suzuki
Opt. Express 21(15) 18053-18060 (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)

Ultra-dense spatial-division-multiplexed optical fiber transmission over 6-mode 19-core fibers

Koji Igarashi, Daiki Soma, Yuta Wakayama, Koki Takeshima, Yu Kawaguchi, Noboru Yoshikane, Takehiro Tsuritani, Itsuro Morita, and Masatoshi Suzuki
Opt. Express 24(10) 10213-10231 (2016)

Trans-oceanic class ultra-long-haul transmission using multi-core fiber

Itsuro Morita, Koji Igarashi, Hidenori Takahashi, Takehiro Tsuritani, and Masatoshi Suzuki
Opt. Express 22(26) 31761-31773 (2014)