319 Tb/s Transmission over 3001 km with S, C and L band signals over >120nm bandwidth in 125 μm wide 4-core fiber
Researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.), Network Research Institute, succeeded the first S, C and L-bands transmission over long-haul distances in a 4-core optical fiber with standard outer diameter (0.125 mm). The researchers, led by Benjamin J. Puttnam, constructed a transmission system that makes full use of wavelength division multiplexing technology by combining different amplifier technologies, to achieve a transmission demonstration with date-rate of 319 terabits per second, over a distance of 3,001 km.
The standard cladding diameter, 4-core optical fiber can be cabled with existing equipment, and it is hoped that such fibers can enable practical high data-rate transmission in the near-term, contributing to the realization of the backbone communications system, necessary for the spread of new communication services Beyond 5G.
The results of this experiment were accepted as a post-deadline paper presentation at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications (OFC 2021).
Long distance transmission, not previously demonstrated with S-band signals, was enabled by constructing a recirculating transmission loop experimental set-up that combined 2 kinds of rare-earth doped fiber amplifiers with Raman amplification distributed along the transmission fiber itself.
The 4-core MCF with standard cladding diameter is attractive for early adoption of SDM fibers in high-throughput, long-distance links, since it is compatible with conventional cable infrastructure and expected to have mechanical reliability comparable to single-mode fibers. Beyond 5G, an explosive increase from new data services is expected and it is therefore crucial to demonstrate how new fibers can meet this demand. Hence, it is hoped that this result will help the realization of new communication systems that can support new bandwidth hungry services.
Until now, NICT has built various transmission systems that make use of wavelength division multiplexing across the C and L-bands together with state-of-the-art modulation technology to explore high data-rate transmission in a range of new optical fibers. Recently, NICT and research groups around the world have begun to explore S-band transmission, leading to several new records for transmission capacity in optical fibers, but transmission distance has been limited to only a few tens of kilometers.
By this, the previous world record of a data transmission rate of 178 terabits a second achieved by the research team led by Dr. Lidia Galdino (UCL Electronic & Electrical Engineering in collaporativ with two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research has been broken.
