Simulation and Design Platform of Novel Optical Fibers for Next Generation Space Division Multiplexing Optical Communication Systems

Funding Agency: RFTONICS

Status: Completed (May 2016)

Research and development in optical fibre data transmission technology is almost reaching the maximum theoretical Shanon’s channel capacity.  The coming standard reaches 400Gbps and Terabit/sec per wavelength. R&D and industry communities’ starts to consider existing single mode fibers (SMF) as no longer appropriate for future requirements, and investigate the next technology jump. In effect, optical fiber network capacity has been growing exponentially during the last two decades and it is expected to continue at the same rate in future. Space-division multiplexing (SDM) is considered as one of the key solutions to satisfy this expected high traffic demand in next generation optical network. The SDM promises more than an order of magnitude growth in terms of capacity compared to current available single-mode fiber networks. Multicore and Multimode fibers (MCF and MMF) are two potential prospected candidates to implement SDM. For instance, MCF based SDM system carries a separate set of ITU WDM channels inside every core. For MMF, SDM is built on the principle of carrying a different group of ITU WDM channels over each fiber propagation mode. Therefore, industry is going to face numerous challenges of development in a wide range of components and modules starting principally by developing novel fiber structures and finding appropriate solutions for the transmitter, the receiver, the amplifiers, chromatic dispersion compensators, polarization mode dispersion compensators, etc. The principle objective of this research is to build a simulation platform for multicore and multimode fibers for next generation space division multiplexing network. This platform helps to design novel structures of fibers (and optical waveguides) with optimized parameters and performances.  This software will also be a building block for the simulation of next generation space division multiplexing systems and subsystems. In future this software can be improved to make more complex functions including multiplexing, switching, amplification, etc.