On the Trade-off between the Maximum Capacity and the Length of a Multicore Fiber Link

The transmission capacity of a multicore fiber (MCF) link is the sum of the capacities of its cores, but the capacity of each core depends not only on the modulation format (MF) and baud rate (BR) of the lightpaths established through the core but also on the inter-core crosstalk (XT) impairments imposed by the adjacent cores in use. For a MCF link of a given length, we propose a Binary Linear Programming formulation to determine the MF and the BR to use on each core, aiming to reach the MCF maximum capacity. Comparing the maximum capacity of a 19-core MCF with the single core fiber counterpart, the influence of the link length on the MCF capacity scaling factor reached by MCFs is characterized.