Impact of the combined effect of random core-dependent and splice losses on intercore crosstalk performance in weakly-coupled multicore fibers

The impact of the combined effect of random core-dependent loss (CDL) and splice loss on the direct average intercore (ICXT) power in weakly-coupled long-haul multicore (MCF) links is studied numerically by analyzing the mean, standard deviation, relative spread and excess of the direct average ICXT power at the link output. For practical values of CDL and splice loss, we show that, due to its higher magnitude, the randomness of the splice loss contributes more significantly to the induced ICXT link performance degradation than CDL. For one MCF span, considering a maximum random splice loss of 0.5 dB and 0.2 dB, the excess of ICXT power reaches, respectively, 2 dB and almost 1 dB. The increase of the number of spans reduces the excess of ICXT power caused by random splice loss, being the excess of ICXT power lower than 0.3 dB for 2000 km-long links.