Researchers from NTT, Fujikura, Hokkaido University and Technical University of Denmark demonstrated ultra-large capacity transmission at 1 petabit (1000 terabits) per second over a 52.4 km length of 12-core (light paths) optical fiber — a new record for transmission over a single strand of fiber. One petabit per second would carry 5,000 HDTV movies of two hours in a single second.
NTT said the breakthrough leverages spatial multiplexing optical communications and new multicore optical fiber (MCF). The two companies and two universities combined their expertise to develop multicore optical fiber designs, fabrication techniques, and spectrally-efficient transmission technologies to carry out this experiment.
The experimental system used a new 12-core MCF structure with the cores arranged in a nearly concentric pattern. A novel fan-in fan-out device employed a digital coherent optical transmission scheme for transmitting DWDM signals in each core. The researchers said the 12-core MCF reduced signal leakage (crosstalk) between adjacent cores, which had been a problem with conventional MCF designs. The systems achieved a transmission capacity of 84.5 terabits per second for each core (= 380 Gbps capacity per wavelength X 222 wavelength channels), for a total capacity of 1.01 petabit (= 12 X 84.5 terabit) per second for the 12-core optical MCF through 52.4 km of fiber.
The result was reported in a postdeadline paper at the European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communications (ECOC 2012).
