Abstract

Crosstalk-power in homogenous single-mode multi-core fibers can vary by more than 20 dB over time and frequency. The extend of these fluctuations depends on the interacting cores’ propagation parameters and the transmitted modulation format. Furthermore, the polarizations of signal and crosstalk can change randomly during transmission. In this paper, we describe the effect of random crosstalk-power variations and the relative signal-crosstalk polarization fluctuations when transmitting single-polarization, intensity-modulated signals such as on-off-keying. We show experimentally that the polarization of a signal fluctuates slower than the polarization of crosstalk, indicating uncorrelated processes. We further investigate the system impact of both, crosstalk-power fluctuations and the relative signal-crosstalk polarization variations on a 10 Gb/s on-off-keying transmission system employing a 10.1 km 19-core multi-core fiber. We show that the two-dimensional space of random fluctuations that is spanned by crosstalk power and relative signal-crosstalk polarization can vary the system's bit error rate by more than five orders of magnitude.