Research on few-mode PAM regenerator based on nonlinear optical fiber loop mirror

Abstract

In recent years, the demand for network bandwidth has increased significantly, and the capacity of wave division multiplexing (WDM) systems has reached the nonlinear Shannon limit. In order to adapt to the development of future networks, space division multiplexing (SDM) technology attracts more and more attention. In this paper, we put forward a novel structure of pulse amplitude modulation(PAM) regenerator based on few-mode nonlinear optical fiber loop mirror (FM-NOLM) for the first time, and theoretically analyze the working principle for few-mode reshaping. It can regenerate degraded PAM signals and improve transmission performance in SDM system. The detailed design steps of the regenerator are given, in which the sulfide highly nonlinear fiber and multimode coupler are used to build up the FM-NOLM and their mode characteristics are simulated by COMSOL software. The parameters of the regenerator are determined by taking the few-mode optical fiber supporting LP₀₁, LP₁₁, and LP₂₁ modes as an example, and then the power transfer function (PTF) curve of each mode for PAM signals is calculated. We simulate and analyze the noise reduction ratio (NRR) performance of the few-mode regenerator for PAM-4 signals, and compare with the case of single mode fiber. Our simulation shows that: (1) for each spatial mode of PAM signal, all regenerative levels have the same consistent power transfer performance; (2) for the input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) greater than 20 dB, the NRR for each mode can exceed 3 dB, and increase with the input SNR at the slope of about 1.2; (3) the NRR difference between the three modes is less than 1.1 dB for the same input SNR. In order to illustrate the reshaping function of the regenerator, we also present the power distribution histograms for PAM-4 signals before and after regeneration when the input SNR is 25 dB. This scheme proposed here has some advantages over the existing regenerators in the applicability for the long-haul SDM system with high spectral efficiency and regeneration of any level number of PAM signals in theory due to its uniform multi-level regeneration function, but also is capable of being extended to the wavelength domain for higher transmission capacity.