Work towards Objective 1:
Several new designs of optical fibres supporting OAM modes were developed and evaluated by University of Laval (UL), including air core fibre (ACF), ring core fibre (RCF), inverse parabolic graded index fibre (IPGIF).. Besides the assessment of their transmission characteristics, equalization methods, nonlinear mode coupling and MIMO algorithms were evaluated. . An alternative design based on a graded index ring core fibre (GIRCF) was developed by UNIVBRIS with the support of the company FiberHome. A 10 OAM x 16 WDM MIMO-aided transmission with both QPSK and 16 QAM modulation formats at 28Gbaud/s over 1Km were demonstrated. These experiments were complemented by demonstrating the transmission of real data-center traffic Ethernet frames through a 1km-long GIRCF fibre carried by 16 WDM channels multiplexed over 10 OAM modes. A number of photonic integrated devices were also implemented to facilitate the optical coupling between the OAM multiplexer and the OAM fibres..
Work towards Objective 2:
The core device architecture for the switch consisted of the cascade of photonic integrated OAM multiplexers and refractive element OAM demultiplexers developed by UoG. The OAM-wavelength switch architectures were tunable over 10 OAM modes and were demonstrated in systems with 16 WDM channels modulated up to 30 Gbaud. The experiments were implemented at CNIT with the contribution of University of Glasgow (UoG), Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre (PSNC), and UNIVBRIS. The packaging activity supported by IBM and CNIT-PNTL enabled the demonstration of a practical and compact device with OAM mode switching time down to the hundreds of nanoseconds timescale and power consumption in the mw/Gb/s range. A field trial implementing the two-layer OAM-WDM switch working under different real-data traffic conditions, including data-center and video traffic was also implemented.
Three possible products emerged from the ROAM activities. IBM, supported by HWDU, identified their market potential, application roadmaps and effective strategies to exploitation. The target cost for the ROAM products was identified carrying out a market analysis.
The project results have been disseminated through scientific journals, presentations at international conferences, project website, project Facebook page, and an OAM dedicated Workshop at the ACP 2017 conference.
