Optimal Pilot-Tone-Aided Multi-Core Fiber Transmission Using a Wideband Comb Transmitter

We systematically measure the noise properties of wide-band optical comb lightwave out of a dispersion-engineered nonlinear fiber mixer, which has restricted the use of such comb technology in the pilot-tone-aided coherent transmission over multi-core fibers. We compare the performance of three transmission technologies using different carrier sources, a 11.7-km multi-core fiber link and 10-GBaud 64 QAM signal. Superiority of shared carrier reception methods against self-homodyne detection is experimentally observed when the noisy optical comb is used as the carrier source. Modified shared carrier reception potentially provides further advantage when we employ higher order QAM formats.