Spatial division multiplexing has been proposed as an option for further capacity increase of transmission fibers. Application of this concept is attractive only, if cost and energy efficient implementations can be found. In this work, optical amplification and optical filter based signal processing concepts are investigated. Deployment of multi mode fibers as the waveguide type for erbium doped fiber amplifiers potentially offers cost and energy efficiency advantages compared to using multi core fibers in preamplifier as well as booster stages. Additional advantages can be gained from optimization of the amplifier module design. Together with transponder design optimizations, they can increase the attractiveness of inverse spatial multiplexing, which is proposed as an intermediate step. Signal processing based on adaptive passive optical filters offers an alternative approach for the separation of channels at the receiver which have experienced mode coupling along the link. With this optical filter based approach, fiber capacity can potentially be increased faster and more energy efficiently than with solutions relying solely on electronic signal processing.
© 2011 Optical Society of America