LAUSR

Abstract. We demonstrate a high data rate and low-cost OM4 multimode fiber (MMF) and free-space optics (FSO)-based self-restorable 2  ×  100  Gbps per wavelength intra data center interconnect between two pairs of servers. This transmission system is based on two vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers that are directly modulated with PAM-4 data at the rate of 100 Gbps and multiplexed using mode division multiplexing of two linearly polarized modes. In case a fault occurs in the MMF-based primary path, the traffic is shifted to FSO-based protection path through a specially designed triggering and switching mechanism. Offline digital signal processing is used at the receiver to process the received PAM-4 signal for compensating the effects of channel impairments. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated at link lengths of 35 and 70 m under normal and faulty scenarios. The effect of varying the refractive index structure parameter of the log-normal channel model and the effect of mode coupling between linearly polarized (LP) modes on the bit-error-rate performance is also analyzed under different conditions. We observe that the performance of the FSO-based protection path is better than the OM4-based primary path at a forward error correction limit of 3.8  ×  10  −  3 bit-error-rate.