Focusing over optical fiber using time reversal

Abstract

A time-reversal array in multimode fiber is proposed for lossless remotely controlled switching using passive optical splitters. The signal to be transmitted is digitally predistorted so that it is routed through the physical layer in order to arrive at only one receiver in an array. The system performance in the presence of an additive white Gaussian noise, modal group delay, and timing error is investigated numerically for single-mode fiber and 10-mode fiber. Focusing using a two-transmitter array and 44 km of single-mode fiber is demonstrated experimentally for 3-GBd QPSK signals with a bit error rate below the forward error correction limit.