Bending and twisting effects on multicore fiber differential group delay

In this paper we provide the theoretical and experimental evaluation of fiber bending and twisting effects on the group delay performance of a homogeneous 7-core fiber. We have experimentally evaluated the differential group delay between the central and outer cores for different curvature radii and twisting conditions, demonstrating that fiber twisting counteracts the degradation introduced by the curvature itself. These findings are generally applicable to time-sensitive application areas such as radio-over-fiber distribution and microwave photonics signal processing in fiber-wireless access networks, as well as high-capacity long-haul digital communications where digital multiple-input multiple-output processing may be required.