Demonstration of a spatial-division multiplexing self-healing ring network

This work demonstrates a spatial-division multiplexing self-healing ring protection scheme. A 3-node, 2-fiber ring with a recirculating length of 139.3 km is implemented using 4-core weakly-coupled multicore working and protection fibers and supported by core-pumped multicore amplifiers. Each node implements a spatial channel switching scheme with 8×8 traffic switches and arrays of 2×2 MEMS switches for ring protection switching with fiber bending taps to simultaneously monitor the power on all cores of the working and protection fibers. We achieve an average loss around 2 dB per network element along the protection path, which enables the use of ring protection with minimal performance impact. With this scheme, we demonstrate the protection of a line-side traffic throughput above 120 Tb/s using polarization-multiplexed 16-ary quadrature-amplitude modulation signals across the C-band.