Field Trial of Optical Transmission Experiment Employing a Microresonator Frequency Comb Light Source for Low-Latency, Short-Reach Optical Communication

We present first-time demonstration of short-reach and low-latency optical communication within a real network, employing a microresonator frequency comb as a light source. The modulated signal is transmitted through a 9-km single-mode optical fiber installed in a metropolitan network. This demonstration paves the way for realizing low-latency massively parallel optical communication, which is the key to beyond-5G and 6G network. For a proof-of-concept experiment, we employ an MgF₂ crystalline microresonator with a 20-GHz free-spectral range that could be used for dense wavelength division multiplexing communication. We generated a stable soliton comb and modulated it with simple 10-Gbps intensity modulation and direct detection to achieve a small excess delay of 3.1 µs.