Space-division multiplexing in optical fibres

By D. Richardson, John Michael Fini, L. Nelson. Nature Photonics, 2013

3,059 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This Review summarizes the simultaneous transmission of several independent spatial channels of light along optical fibres to expand the data-carrying capacity of optical communications. Recent results achieved in both multicore and multimode optical fibres are documented. Optical communication technology has been advancing rapidly for several decades, supporting our increasingly information-driven society and economy. Much of this progress has been in finding innovative ways to increase the data-carrying capacity of a single optical fibre. To achieve this, researchers have explored and attempted to optimize multiplexing in time, wavelength, polarization and phase. Commercial systems now utilize all four dimensions to send more information through a single fibre than ever before. The spatial dimension has, however, remained untapped in single fibres, despite it being possible to manufacture fibres supporting hundreds of spatial modes or containing multiple cores, which could be exploited as parallel channels for independent signals.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c76f47a5dbde72b86ad68108c91782ce06705a6

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Citations in the corpus

The photonic lantern (2014, background): “35 degree of freedom to be exploited is the spatial distribution of the light, either between several separate cores in a multicore fibre or between several modes in a multimode (or "few-mode") fibre [75,155].”
Optical communications using orbital angular momentum beams (2015, methodology): “In light of MDM in FMFs, LP modes have been used to achieve impressive results [1,2].”
Advances in communications using optical vortices (2016, neutral): “Few-mode fiber (FMF), multicore fiber (MCF), and few-mode multicore fiber (FM-MCF) are typical candidates used in SDM fiber optical communications [26–28].”
Light fields in complex media: Mesoscopic scattering meets wave control (2017, background): “In fiber communications, where the spatial degrees of freedom in MMFs are the last ones remaining to be exploited for higher data rate (Richardson et al., 2013), wavefront shaping has already opened the possibility to physically decouple the transmission modes, rather than unmixing the transmitted…”
Learning to see through multimode fibers (2018, background): “Optical fibers are prominently used in telecommunications [1] and endoscopy for medical diagnosis [2].”
Advances in terahertz communications accelerated by photonics (2016, background): “…ensure a high modulation index is obtained with optical-to-THz conversion using photomixing, high-speed amplitude and/or phase coding introduced from optical coherent network technologies, which have been widely developed since 2000s and are now a mature platform for fibre-optic core networks 24 .”
Nonlinear Fourier Transform for Optical Data Processing and Transmission: Advances and Perspectives (2017, background): “Spacedivision multiplexing (SDM) is considered by many engineers as a promising direction in the evolution of optical transmission systems [17].”