Fig. 5: Laboratory setup for data transmission over a 19-core fiber.

Three hundred eighty-one wavelength channels were generated and modulated with dual-polarization 64-QAM signals. To address all 19 cores, all 381 channels were split and delayed to generate 19 decorrelated copies, which were transmitted over the 19-core fiber. At the receiver, a 38 × 38 coherent MIMO receiver was used to undo mixing between the spatial channels and recover the transmitted signal.