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The Role of Parallelism in the Evolution of Optical Fiber Communication Systems

In order to overcome the capacity limitations of current lightwave systems based on the single-mode optical fiber, massively parallel transmission in the spatial domain [space-division multiplexing (SDM)] supported by extended parallelism in the frequency domain (ultrawideband (UWB) systems) must be used. This article reviews key aspects of parallel transmission systems as the only significant capacity scaling option going forward and discusses the various tradeoffs on an architectural level and a hardware integration level. In doing so, this article also serves as an introduction to the more detailed accounts of fiber-optic systems and their future scaling within this Special Issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE.