Terabit Optical Wireless-Fiber Communication With Kramer-Kronig Receiver—Part I

An optical communication link is proposed for high speed point-to-point data transmission. The link incorporates both fiber and optical wireless technologies. Kramer-Kronig coherent detection is used due to its component and implementation simplicity. Spatial multiplexing, via a multi-core fiber followed by a wireless link, and wavelength division multiplexing allow the efficient exploitation of all available degrees of freedom. The link signal-to-noise ratio is estimated when all possible noise sources are taken into account. The impact of link loss and optical amplifier placement on the achievable SNR are studied theoretically. Finally, it is shown that over 1 Tb/s is achievable per wavelength with a 4-core fiber and a simple optical wireless alignment system. An important application of this design would be backhaul and intra-data center links.