Multicore Fiber Scenarios Supporting Power Over Fiber in Radio Over Fiber Systems

We propose the integration of power over ber in the next generation 5G radio access network
front-haul solutions based on spatial division multiplexing with multicore bers. The different architectures
in both shared- and dedicated- core scenarios for power over ber delivery and data signals are described.
The maximum power to be delivered depending on the efciencies of the different components is addressed as well as the limits of the delivered energy to avoid ber fuse and non-linear effects. It is shown how those limits depend on high power laser linewidth, ber attenuation, link length and ber core effective area. The impairments related to non-linear effects, multicore ber crosstalk and temperature are also theoretically analyzed. Experiments show there is no degradation of signal quality for feeding powers of several hundreds of milliwatts for both scenarios in 4-core multicore bers. This study helps in designing future power by light delivery solutions in Radio over Fiber systems with multicore fibers.