S/C/L-Band Transmission in Few-Mode MCF With Optical Frequency Comb Regeneration via Single-Mode Core Seed Distribution

Abstract

We demonstrate parametric optical frequency comb (OFC) regeneration based on a transmitted seed in a high spatial density SDM fiber with 114 spatial channels and a seed distribution core. We show that such a fiber is compatible with ultra-high data rate links in a recently proposed network architecture that exploits the synergy between SDM fibers and OFC technology, extending this network concept to include few-mode cores for the first time. The employed OFCs support the generation of 650 x 25 GHz-spaced carriers covering the S/C/L-band for a total useful bandwidth of 134 nm, i.e., 50% wider than previously demonstrated with an OFC. Data rates of approximately 330 Tb/s per few-mode core are measured, with a potential of more than 12.7 Pb/s per fiber. We show that the use of OFCs for both transmission and detection simplifies coherent reception with a 3 orders of magnitude lower frequency offset compared to conventional intradyne schemes. We also show that the phase coherence among the comb carriers can be exploited to share digital signal processing (DSP) resources among the received channels. These results demonstrate the potential of OFCs for high-capacity networking, capable of replacing hundreds of transceiver lasers in each node and simplifying the DSP through the use of coherent and frequency-locked carriers.