Demonstration of a spatially multiplexed multicore fibre-based next-generation radio-access cellular network

This paper proposes and demonstrates a next-generation radio-access network employing multicore fibre in the optical wireless fronthaul and mode-division multiplexing in the backhaul to overcome the capacity limitation of single-mode fibre systems. The proposed optical fronthaul is based on radio-over-fibre (RoF) transmission on multicore fibre. The combination of RoF and multicore fibre permits cost- and energy-efficient support of MIMO wireless present in actual 4G cellular systems, which is a key requirement for next-generation 5G radio technology. The performance of RoF transmission in a 4-core fibre using LTE-Advanced radio signals implementing 2×2 MIMO coding is reported in this paper altogether with the crosstalk performance with different bending radius and random twist. The proposed backhaul optical network is based on modal-division multiplexing over a single wavelength. Few-mode transmission is employed in order to increase the transmission capacity of the backhaul network. Few-mode transmission performance is analysed considering the propagation of two LP mode groups taking into account both modal and chromatic dispersion transmission impairments in the optical backhaul.