Impact of Inter-Core Crosstalk on Performance of Spectrally- Spatially Flexible Optical Networks with B2B Regeneration

One of the most promising fibers for spatial division multiplexing (SDM) is weakly-coupled multi-core fiber (MCF). Despite significant capacity increase, MCFs suffer from physical layer impairments due to inter-core crosstalk (XT), which is the amount of signal leaking from adjacent cores. In this work, we focus on the impact of worst-case XT of MCFs on network performance in a dynamic traffic scenario in translucent spectrally-spatially flexible optical networks (SS-FON) operating with MCFs and realizing spectral super-channel transmission. Signal regeneration is achieved with transceivers operating in back-to-back (B2B) configuration, assuming limited spectrum and transceiver resources. Moreover, we apply a realistic transmission reach model that accounts for XT-related and other signal impairments. We perform extensive experiments on two representative network topologies, assuming different amounts of available resources and MCF characteristics.