On the way to the capacity limits of the optical fiber

The steady growth of data traffic drives optical transport technologies efficiently exploiting the capacity provided by the deployed fibers. The ongoing effort to approach theoretical capacity limit of the non-linear fiber channel will be illustrated by a brief look at the evolution of transmitter/receiver technologies. Then modulation, multiplex formats and transceiver technologies implemented in deployed 100-Gbit/s systems and under investigation for future N•100-Gbit/s systems will be resumed. The final part is devoted to new fibers. After an overview on enhancements of standard single-mode fiber, the discussion concludes with multi-core fiber and mode-diversity transmission over multi-mode fiber.