10 Gbps CPRI signals transmission impaired by intercore crosstalk in 5G network fronthauls with multicore fibers

The impact of intercore crosstalk (ICXT) of weakly-coupled multicore fibers (MCFs) on the transmission performance of a Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) signal in 5G networks fronthaul is studied by numerical simulation. The results show that forward error correction-supported CPRI signals have more tolerance to ICXT due to the higher targeted bit error rate (of 10 −3 ). For a receiver power penalty of 1 dB, an improvement of the tolerance of CPRI signals to ICXT, due to the increase of the MCF skew by about 1 dB, is observed. However, for the crosstalk levels that lead to 1 dB power penalty, we have shown that, the system is unavailable with a high probability. The crosstalk level required for an acceptable outage probability is about 10 dB lower than the crosstalk level leading to 1 dB power penalty.