Experimental assessment of the time-varying impact of multi-core fiber crosstalk on a SSB-OFDM signal

The impact of inter-core crosstalk in a homogeneous 19-core multi-core fiber on the performance of directly detected single-sideband (SSB) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is assessed experimentally. It is shown that the crosstalk-induced error vector magnitude penalty varies over time and across OFDM subcarriers by as much as 7 dB over a period of 36 hours.