Introduction
Today’s society relies – to an unprecedented extent – on broadband communication solutions with applications such as high-speed Internet access, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile voice and data services, multimedia broadcast systems and high-capacity data networking for grid computing and remote storage. The total Internet traffic has grown from 103 Tbyte in 1997 to more than 109 Tbyte in 2019 [1, prg 1. Introduction].
The information highways that make these services possible are, almost exclusively, optical fibers [1, prg 1. Introduction]. No other known medium can support the massive demands for data rate, reliability and energy efficiency. The race for ever better performance continues and the capacity of a single fiber has ...
