Space-Division Multiplexing: The Future of Fiber-Optic Communications

Over many decades, network traffic has been growing exponentially, with cumulative annual growth rates (CAGRs) between 20% and 100% per year, the exact numbers varying among traffic types, application areas, transmission distances, and operator specificities. While many incumbent telecom operators are seeing growth rates at the lower end of the distribution, some webscale providers are faced with a doubling of traffic in their networks each year, cf. Ref. 1 and references cited therein. This traffic growth has been economically enabled by a variety of telecommunication technologies whose long-term growth rates are summarized in Table I.