MIMO Communications over Multi-Mode Optical Fibers: Capacity Analysis and Input-Output Coupling Schemes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the capacity of MIMO systems over multi-mode optical fibers, proposing scalable input-output coupling schemes and models that improve capacity estimates and are practical for fibers with many modes.

Contribution

It introduces scalable coupling schemes and a statistical channel model for MIMO optical fibers, enabling capacity analysis and enhancement without replacing fibers.

Findings

Capacity approaches that of single-mode fibers with CSI

Input-output coupling increases overall capacity

Minimal capacity loss when CSI is unavailable

Abstract

We consider multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communications over multi-mode fibers (MMFs). Current MMF standards, such as OM3 and OM4, use fibers with core radii of 50 \mu m, allowing hundreds of modes to propagate. Unfortunately, due to physical and computational complexity limitations, we cannot couple and detect hundreds of data streams into and out of the fiber. In order to circumvent this issue, we present input-output coupling schemes that allow the user to couple and extract a reasonable number of signals from a fiber with many modes. This approach is particularly attractive as it is scalable; i.e., the fibers do not have to be replaced every time the number of transmitters or receivers is increased, a phenomenon that is likely to happen in the near future. We present a statistical channel model that incorporates intermodal dispersion, chromatic dispersion, mode dependent losses, mode coupling, and input-output coupling. We show that the statistics of the fiber's frequency response are independent of frequency. This simplifies the computation of the average Shannon capacity of the fiber. We also provide an input-output coupling strategy that leads to an increase in the overall capacity. This strategy can be used whenever channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter. We show that the capacity of an Nt by Nt MIMO system over a fiber with M>>Nt modes can approach the capacity of an Nt-mode fiber with no mode-dependent losses. We finally present a statistical input-output coupling model in order to quantify the loss in capacity when CSI is not available at the transmitter. It turns out that the loss, relative to Nt-mode fibers, is minimal (less than 0.5 dB) for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and a reasonable range of MDLs.