We realize a multicore erbium-doped fiber amplifier (MC-EDFA) with 2dB optical gain improvement (average) by recycling the residual 0.98μm pump light from the MC-EDF output. Eight-channel per core wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) Nyquist PM-16QAM optical signal amplification is demonstrated over a 40-minute period. Furthermore, we demonstrate the proposed MC-EDFA's stability by using it to amplify a Nyquist PM-16QAM signal and evaluating the resulting Q-factor variation. We found that our scheme contributes to reducing the total power consumption of MC-EDFAs in spatial division multiplexing (SDM)/WDM networks by up to 33.5%.

We propose multi-core erbium-doped fiber amplifiers for next-generation optical amplifiers utilized by space-division multiplexing technologies. Multi-core erbium-doped fiber amplifiers were studied widely as a means for overcoming exponential growth of internet traffic in the backbone network. We consider two approaches to excitation of erbium irons; One is core-pumping scheme, the other is cladding-pumping scheme. For a core-pumping configuration, we evaluate its applicability to future ultra long-haul network. In addition, we demonstrate that cladding-pumping configuration will enable reduction of power consumption, size, and cost because one multimode pumping laser diode can excite several cores simultaneously embedded in a common cladding and amplify several signals passed through the multi-core erbium-doped fiber cores.