OAM Modes in Optical Fibers for Next Generation Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) Systems

Due to the renewed demand on data bandwidth imposed by the upcoming capacity crunch, optical communication (research and industry) community has oriented their effort to space division multiplexing (SDM) and particularly to mode division multiplexing (MDM). This is based on separate/independent and orthogonal spatial modes of optical fiber as data carriers along optical fiber. Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) is one of the variants of MDM that showed promising features including the efficient enhancement of capacity transmission from Tbit to Pbit and substantial improvement of spectral efficiency up to hundreds (bs-1 Hz-1). In this chapter, we review the potentials of harnessing SDM as a promising solution for next generation global communications systems. We focus on different SDM approaches and we address specifically the MDM (different modes in optical fiber). Finally, we highlight the recent main works and achievements that have been conducted (in last decade) in OAM-MDM over optical fibers. We focus on main R&D activities incorporating specialty fibers that have been proposed, designed and demonstrating in order to handle appropriates OAM modes