Analysis of Optical SDM Ring Network Protection with MIMO Application

We have previously shown that space division multiplexing (SDM) based optical ring network consisting of multicore fibers (MCFs) and optical switch nodes such as optical add-drop multiplexers (OADMs) can be a promising application of optical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique. This network model is effective in avoiding the degradation of MIMO channel capacity due to route switching by nodes. In this paper, we proposed a new ring protection scheme for this ring network model by applying MIMO processing. It was found that this proposed method can prevent signal interruption even without switching at the nodes, especially in the fully coupled environment.