Impact of Intercore Crosstalk on the Transmission Distance of QAM Formats in Multicore Fibers

We investigate the impact of intercore crosstalk on the achievable transmission distance of three square quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats. We show that increasing intercore crosstalk across an 18 dB range starting from -43.4 dB/100 km reduces the achievable transmission distance for all formats, with a greater impact on higher order modulation formats. For a crosstalk level arising from equal signal launch power in each core of a homogeneous 7-core fiber, we measure a reduced transmission distance at BER 1/4 1.5 × 10
^-2
of 24%, 38% and 54%, for polarization-division-multiplexed-quadrature phase-shift keying (PDM-QPSK), PDM-16QAM, and PDM-64QAM, respectively. Finally, we investigate the potential impact that dynamic crosstalk variation could have in transmission systems based on multicore fiber and estimate the achievable reach for an outage probability of 1 × 10
^-5
in the presence of dynamically varying intercore crosstalk.