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Past, Current and Future Technologies
for Optical Submarine Cables
Hitoshi Takeshita Masaki Sato
System Platform Research Laboratories, System Platform Research Laboratories,
NEC Corporation NEC Corporation
Kanagawa, Japan Kanagawa, Japan
h-takeshita@bc.jp.nec.com m-satou@kj.jp.nec.com
Emmanuel Le Taillandier de
Gabory
System Platform Research
Laboratories,
NEC Corportion
Kanagawa, Japan
e-degabory@cb.jp.nec.com
Abstract—Optical submarine cables are a crucial
infrastructure as they convey 99% of internet traffic between
countries and continents. Although, their history is rooted in the
middle in the 19th Century with the first transatlantic telegraph
cable, the uninterrupted strong growth of current internet traffic
has been a prime motivation for the introduction of several
disruptive technologies. In this paper, we review technologies used
in past and current optical submarine cables, as well as future
technological trends to increase their capacity.
Keywords—submarine cables, optical communication, high
capacity transmission, WDM, SDM, coherent reception
I. INTRODUCTION
Starting with early telegraph, then phone line and now
internet connections, information and communication
technologies have been a key element to offer richer way of life
and always better services to people across continents. This has
fueled the increasing need for communication and information
transport capacity, which has noticeably paced up with the
emergence of internet in the last decade of the 20th Century.
Since then, a high pace increase of capacity is being needed to
match the global communication traffic, which has been
growing at high rates, and which still presents 26 % of CAGR
nowadays [1]. In return, communication systems and
infrastructure have tremendously evolved to accommodate this
continuous traffic growth.
Among communication systems, optical submarine cables
are a key infrastructure, through which most of the internet
traffic between countries and continents is conveyed. They are
Part of these research results was obtained within “Research and
Development of Innovative Optical Network Technology for a Novel Social
Infrastructure” (technological theme II, “Multicore Large Capacity Optical
Transmission System Technology”), commissioned research of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan.
Another distinct part of these research results was obtained within
“Research and Development of Space-Division Multiplexing Photonic Node”,
commissioned research of the National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE

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Yoshihisa Inada
Submarine Network Division,
NEC Corporation
Tokyo, Japan
y-inada@ak.jp.nec.com
Yuichi Nakamura
Central Research Laboratories,
NEC Corportion
Kanagawa, Japan
yuichi@az.jp.nec.com
deployed by ship and laid on the bottom of oceans, where they
are in service for decades. This crucial role, the scale of
submarine cables ranging from a few hundreds of kilometers for
island reach [2-3] to more than 10,000 km for transpacific reach
[4-5], as well as their harsh environment of deployment have a
strong influence on their design, making them unique among
optical communication systems.
As submarine cable have a huge scale and therefore a high
cost, their operators have been eager to maximizing the capacity
of information of they can transport from shore to shore. This
has been a reason to relentlessly introduce innovative
technologies for optical submarine cable systems. Recently, an
important portion of cables has been used to connect data centers
placed on each sides of the ocean. Major content providers are
now operating, at least partially, submarine cables [5-6]. The
huge increase of traffic among data center is a prime mover for
the increase of capacity in submarine cables. This has even
paced up the race for the introduction of innovative technologies
in recent years.
In this paper, we first describe the main characteristics, the
principle and crucial functions of submarine cables. Then, we
review the history of innovation in cable systems, from early
cables to latest deployed ones, which have been key enabling
technologies to support the continuous increase in capacity.
Finally, we present recent research results on technologies,
which are expected to enable to continue increasing the capacity
of submarine cables in the future.
II. PRINCIPLE OF OPTICAL SUBMARINE CABLES
In this part, we present basic concepts on submarine cable.
We first describe their main characteristics, then their main
function. Finally, we show some principle of operation.
A. Main characteristics of optical submarine cables
Current optical submarine cables can transport an
information capacity in the range of 100 Tb/s across
transoceanic distances. Concretely, one cable could enable
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Fig. 1. Schematic of the main parts of a submarine system.
simultaneously 1,490,000,000 phone lines or transmit
simultaneously 2,500 DVD per second through distances in the
range of 10,000 km. The combination of such a huge transport
capacity and such the ultra-long distances is unique among
communication systems. While the amount of information
transport through geostationary satellites and submarine cables
was roughly equal in 1995, it is now more than 99% in favor of
submarine cable due to this high capacity and to 5 time lower
latency on transpacific distances [7].
Obviously, optical submarine cables are deployed by
specialized ships in the sea between terminal stations located on
the shores [8]. In shallow waters, different measures can be
taken to protect the cables from the damage mainly caused by
boats, anchors and fishing activities; for instance they can be
designed and manufactured with a single or even a double
armor; they can also be buried in the ocean floor. For deeper
waters, they are laid on the surface of oceans. The depth can
reach 8,000 m [9], where the water pressure reaches 800 kg/cm2
and the cable tension 6 t. On the shore, such a huge pressure
would be equivalent to supporting a car on a single finger. This
imposes very stringent design to submarine cables.
Despite such extreme conditions, reliability is an important
characteristics of submarine cables. This is due to their crucial
role as an indispensable infrastructure. Typically, the life time
of the cable is 25 years. Traffic interruption is allowed for less
than 5 minutes by year. In case of a broken or deficient cable,
repair is allowed but the number of repairs and the resulting
additional optical loss is defined with the cable operator for each
section of the cable: land cable, shore end, shallow water and
deep water. In this case, the fault is precisely localized from the
shore on the long distance of the cable, a repair ship is launched;
it first searches for the cable on the bottom of the ocean, it then
lifts up the cable or its both sectioned ends. Repair of high end
parts or fusion splicing of its optical fiber is performed on the
ship despite rolling. Notably, the possibility of additional cable
length added to repair the cable up on the ship (typically 2.5
times the deployed cable depth) is taken into account at the time
of the design of the cable; this is a stringent additional design
constraint.
B. Main parts of a submarine cable system
A submarine cable system can be divided between its dry
plant and its wet plant, as illustrated on figure 1. The dry plant
is the part of the system, which is located on the shore. It consists

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of the transponders, which transmit and receive optical signals
through the fibers of the cable, of Power Feeding Equipment
(PFE), which provides high voltage to the wet plant and a
monitoring system, which detects and localizes faults or cuts in
the wet plant.
The wet plant of the system is located in the sea. It consists
of the cable, which contains the Fiber Pairs (FP) transmitting the
optical signal, the conductor, which conducts the high voltage
provided by the PFE and repeaters placed in the cable, which
amplify the optical signal after it is attenuated by the
transmission through the optical fiber.
C. Principle of operation
The transponders emits optical signals, which are
multiplexed using Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM).
They can be installed and upgraded during the life time of the
cable for increasing the capacity of the system [10]. Moreover,
the PFE provides high voltage, up to ±15,000 V, through the
copper conductor of the wet plant to the repeaters. Noticeably,
the repeater design has to take into account the PFE limit [11].
The repeaters placed on fiber distances ranging typically
from 50 km to 100 km are powered by the PFE from the shore.
They contain optical amplifiers based on Erbium Doped Fiber
Amplifier (EDFA) [12]. The EDFA are pumped optically and
the optical pumps are power through the supplied voltage. On
the one hand, shorter repeater spacing reduces the fiber
attenuation before enabling higher Optical Signal to Noise Ratio
(OSNR), which translates into higher capacity of the cable; on
the other hand, longer repeater spacing enables to reduce their
number and the cost of the submarine cable at the expense of
reducing the OSNR. The gain of the EDFA is flattened with
optical filter to avoid differences of gains and OSNR over the
different WDM multiplexed channels [13].
A typical cable design would be 144 Tb/s of capacity
enabled by 90 optical channels multiplexed by WDM, each
channel offering 200 Gb/s transmitted and received by
transponders and transported over 8 FP. A FP consists of a pair
of two fibers transmitting signals, each in the opposite direction
of the other fiber of the pair.
III. AN HISTORY OF INNOVATION FROM EARLY TIME CABLES TO
LATEST OPTICAL SUBMARINE CABLES
In this part, we review several major innovations, which
have enabled to sustain the continuous increase of capacity of
submarine cables. These innovation feature WDM, dispersion
map design and digital coherent technologies.
A. Early time submarine cables
The history of submarine cables is rooted in the first
telegraphic cables installed in Europe in the years 1840. The
very firsts telegraphic cables deployed across the Atlantic Ocean
date back to the years 1850. They enabled a capacity of less than
10 words by minute.
TAT-1, the first submarine communication system across
the Atlantic Ocean realized by using coaxial cable dates back to
1956. It was about ten years before the first satellite
communication system was realized [14]. The transmission
capacity of TAT-1 was around 10 Mb/s.
B. First optical cables
In the years 1980, the optical fiber transmission technology
was developed; it was used in 1988 for the transatlantic TAT-8
system. This submarine cable system enabled to increase
transmission distance and capacity. The capacity of TAT-8 was
0.5 Gb/s. In the same period of time, the transpacific cable TPC-
3 was deployed. TAT-8 and TPC-3 used light sources at 1.3 Pm
[15]. The wavelength of 1.55 Pm was used for the following
systems TAT-9 and TPC-4; it enabled to double the capacity
[16].
Initially, the submarine optical cable systems could use only
one communication channel per fiber. It was regenerated
individually. As an optical cable was made of several fibers, a
few communication channels cable were available for the whole
cable.
C. The apparition of the WDM era
With the development of WDM technology in 1990s, more
than one hundred communication channels per fiber can be used
now. Each channel has a carrier at a different wavelength. The
adoption of WDM was triggered by the realization of efficient
EDFA, which enables the inline amplification of all the optical
signals of one fiber without using regeneration to cope with the
attenuation of the fiber [17]. Optical amplification was
introduced on the transpacific cable TPC5-N in 1995 [18]. On
the Atlantic side, the TAT-12 and TAT-13 transoceanic cables
were deployed in 1996 [19]; they were using WDM and EDFA
to offer a capacity of 20 Gb/s over 5,913 km.
With the apparition of WDM, nonlinear impairment between
multiplexed channels became serious a problem. It was
enhanced by the low chromatic dispersion (CD) designs used for
single channel transmission. Therefore different designs
appeared, using both positive and negative CD fiber in to keep
the total line dispersion null, while local dispersion is non-null,
to cause decorrelation among WDM channels and thus to reduce
the nonlinear impairments. A variety of designs have been
introduced [20], which was favored by the fact that submarine
span design is can be optimized and reproduced freely, as the
submarine transmission line is not impacted by local topology.

D. The advent of the digital coherent era
Although the research on coherent reception had been
flourishing in the years 1980, it was not commercialized at that
time as the advent of EDFA became predominant. The
combined progresses of CMOS process and of digital signal
processing have enabled its resurgence [21] and its deployment
in dry plants in the years 2000 [22].
Digital coherent technology based on coherent reception and
digital signal processing have enabled to compensate for linear
impairments including chromatic dispersion and polarization
mode dispersion. Namely, digital compensation of CD enables
simple cable design without complex management maps [23].
Furthermore, digital coherent technology also enables to
mitigate some of nonlinear impairments. As impairment
compensation technologies for ultra-long distances is circuit
resource consuming, efficient scheme and circuit design are key
technologies for their implementation [24].
Furthermore, the use of digital coherent technology enables
the use of polarization multiplexing and multilevel modulation
formats to increase spectral efficiency and therefore capacity.
The first systems were based on polarization multiplexed
quaternary phase shift keying (PM-QPSK) [23] but later
generations use quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) for
increased capacity, like as deployed on the FASTER submarine
cable, which connects 9,000 km distance between Japan and US
[4, 5]. Namely, the transmission capacity of the FASTER cable
was initially reported as 60 Tb/s, which corresponds about 2,000
times of the transmission capacity per fiber of the first WDM
submarine optical cable systems.
Even more advanced technologies based on multi-dimension
modulation and coded modulation enable to increase the
capacity of systems [25]. Furthermore, probabilistic shaping,
which relies on non-uniform symbol distribution on a high order
QAM constellation base to approach a Gaussian symbol
distribution, is expected to increase capacity of existing
submarine cables through transponder upgrades [5, 26]
IV. FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES FOR TRANSMISSION CAPACITY
EXPANSION
In this part, we describe technologies, which are promising
to increase the capacity of submarine cables in the future and to
keep up the pace of increasing internet traffic. First, we describe
signal processing technology, which can be used in dry plant and
applied to all cables, including the oldest ones. Then we describe
technologies for the wet plant, which will allow new cables to
gain even more capacity.
A. Advanced signal processing using Artificial Intelligence
for the dry plant
Nonlinear impairment mitigation and compensations
techniques [24] based on scheme derived from physical model
have brought significant to the achievable transmission capacity
through long distances. However, considering the long distance
of submarine cables, the nonlinearity of the optical fiber still
remains a major limitation for current systems [27].
Several novel schemes are now being researched for future
implementation, in order to approach the Shannon capacity limit
per fiber. A promising approach consists in using artificial-
intelligence (AI) based nonlinear compensation [28]. This
technique is based using a black-box model of the submarine
cable with deep learning. This data driven approach works for
open cables without knowledge of surrounding channels.
Noticeably, is not affected by the discrepancies between a real
10,000 km submarine fiber in a submarine cable and a physical
model based on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, like the one
which are used more commonly for compensation of nonlinear
impairments [24]. AI based nonlinear compensation was
successfully demonstrated by training a deep neural network
consisting of 2 hidden layers, with known but randomly
generated patterns, minimizing the mean square error between
the transmitted and compensated symbols. The use of intra-
channel cross-phase modulation and intra-channel four-wave
mixing triplets is the key feature of this promising approach to
efficiently compensate nonlinear impairments [28].
This method does not require knowledge of the cable or of
the surrounding channels. It may be implemented in future
transponders and applied to existing optical submarine cables in
order to increase their capacity, in the limit of the Shannon limit
per fiber.
B. Space-Division Multiplexing for the wet plant
One problem is that the capacity expansion of the optical
transmission systems, using conventional WDM technology and
dry plant related technology, is supposed to reach the Shannon
theoretical limitation [29]. Therefore, disruptive technology
different from the conventional WDM technology using Single
Core Single Mode Fiber (SC-SMF) for capacity expansion is
needed to maintain the support of global communication traffic,
which is growing at 26 % of CAGR [1].
1) Design of wet plants using multicore fibers
To support such a large annual growth of global
communication traffic, several options can be considered to
solve the theoretical limitation of the capacity expansion of the
conventional optical transmission systems using SC-SMF.
Among optical communication systems, submarine
transmission systems will reach the theoretical limitation first.
One of the reason is that the transmission distance is much
longer than for terrestrial systems while the signal multiplexing
density is equal or higher. Therefore, the current SC-SMF based
submarine optical cable systems are the first candidate to adopt
disruptive Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) technology [30].
Capacity expansion by increasing the number of FP has been
discussed and investigated. It is the one of the options of SDM
technology.
However, considering industrial limitations such as the cost
optimization [31], the limitation of the installation space [32]
and the electric power supply [33], the simple increase of the FP
cannot be a long term solution but only a temporary one. Indeed,
due to the PFE limit and space constraint inside submarine
cables, the number of FP should be under 30 [33]. Therefore, the
effect of the FP increase is limited in capacity and therefore
generation of systems. SDM technology using Multi Core Fiber
(MCF) is one of the promising candidate to solve the problem of
the capacity expansion of the optical transmission systems in
longer term. It has been actively researched to put this disruptive
technology based on a change in transmission medium into
practical use [34-39].

The current maximum number of cores has been reported as
high as 100 [35], although SDM signal transmission on this
record fiber still needs to be verified. As for the SDM signal
transmission, 10 Pb/s transmission capacity has been realized by
using 6-mode 19-core fibers [36] and 228 SDM channels has
been realized by using 3-mode 39-core fibers [37]. These reports
use uncoupled core (UC) type MCF, where the cores are
independent and crosstalk among cores is limited. In contrast,
Coupled Core (CC) MCF has densely packed cores with
intentionally high crosstalk.
UC-MCF based transmission systems are more compatible
with conventional SMF transmission system than their CC-MCF
based counterpart. Indeed, CC-MCF transmission systems needs
Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) function in the transponder
since the optical signals propagating in the cores are no longer
independent. However, CC-MCF transmission systems have the
merit that the optical signals can be transmitted over longer
distance since the non-linear impairments are weaker due to the
propagation modes among coupled cores [38]. Therefore, CC-
MCF based systems are expected to achieve both high capacity
and ultra-long haul transmission.
2) Amplification technology for submarine cables
However, most of these reports did not use any SDM optical
amplifiers which can collectively amplify SDM signal. Indeed,
it is currently difficult to achieve optical amplification
performance commensurate with such a high multiplicity in the
spatial dimension. As the SDM optical amplifier is
indispensable to repeat SDM signals in the long haul optical
transmission systems, including optical submarine cable
systems, it realization and efficiency are key. Although 12-core
fiber transmission has been already reported over 1,500km by
using 19-core fiber based cladding pumped EDFA [39], there
still remains much room to improve the efficiency of the
cladding pumping for amplifying the SDM optical signal in the
C-band. This need is even higher for submarine systems where
the power supply to the amplifiers is performed from the PFE
located on the shore only.
For cladding pumping, optical amplification efficiency is
mainly dependent to the number on the core density which is
defined as the ratio of the number of core by the cladding area
[40]. Fig. 2 shows some calculation results of the core density
2000
[42]
1800
1600
Single core EDFA
Core density [mm-2]
1400
1200 Uncoupled core
1000 MC-EDFA
[41] Coupled core
800 [40]
MC-EDFA
600
[39]
400 [44]
200
Single core EDFA
0
0 10 20 30 40
Number of cores
Fig. 2. Calculated core densities for UC- and CC-MC-EDFA.
reported UC- and CC-MC-EDFA so far [39-41, 42, 44]. Clearly,
CC-MC-EDFA has potential for very high cladding pump
efficiency as shown by the high core density for 12-core CC-
MC-EDFA.
As for core pumping, the optical amplification efficiency can
be improved by sharing the pump light among multiple cores
[44]. In the case of CC-MC-EDFA, the pump light may naturally
be shared among cores inside the amplifying medium [45].
Considering this case, fig.3 shows a calculated relationship
between the required pump power per core and the maximum
sharing order of core pumping among cores. The black line
marks the zero efficiency curve for SDM sharing of pump light
among coupled cores. The pump sharing is effective at low
pump power due to inefficiency of lasing threshold. When pump
power becomes high, the effect is decreased due to the
nonlinearity and the saturation of laser output. Such
characteristics show that for more power efficiency in future
submarine systems, the capacity should be allocated on the SDM
axis and moderated on the WDM axis, which requires more
pump power for the same amplification as the amplification
bandwidth is widened.
17
Optical Power
15
[N cores / N pump lasers]
Maximum sharing order
13
11
Op
9
7 Notably, the pump combiner of fiber type and free-optics
5 Power efficient
SDM sharing
3 with the pump recycling technology, called Turbo Cladding
1 Pumping scheme (TCP). It is the most effective when paired
0 50 100 150
Required pump power per core [mW]
Fig. 3. Area of sharing efficiency for core pumping with CC-MC-EDFA
3) Pump recycling technology for efficient MCF
amplification
Pump recycling technology is promising to improve optical
amplification efficiency of the cladding pumped MC-EDFA.
Because most of pump optical power injected into the outer
cladding of the double cladding structured MC-EDF [43] is
outputted without contributing SDM signal amplification. Since
2018, pump recycling schemes for 7-core [47, 48] and 19-core
Fig. 4. The fundamental configuration of the cladding pumped MC-
EDFA with the pump recycling technology
[46] EDFA have been reported to improve the efficiency of the
cladding pumping.
The fundamental configuration of the cladding pumped MC-
EDFA with the pump recycling technology is shown in Fig. 4.
The main difference from the conventional Single Core EDFA
(SC-EDFA) is that the pump splitter is used and that the
reinjected recycled pump is multiplex in the spatial dimension
with the original pump. The pump light is separated from the
signal light and re-injected into the outer cladding of the double
cladding structured MC-EDF by using the pump splitter. The
pump splitter plays an important role for the pump recycling
process because the optical power of the recycled pump light
directly depends on its efficiency. Fiber type [43, 48] and free
space optics type [47] pump splitters have been proposed and
evaluated. As the cladding pumping is used, the pump combiner
for the cladding pumped MC-EDFA is different from it for the
conventional core pumped SC-EDFA. The main difference is
the coupling loss of the 1.5 Pm signal light and the 0.98 Pm
pump light due to the pump combiner. The coupling loss due to
the pump combiner for the cladding pumped MC-EDFA is much
smaller than it for the core pumped SC-EDFA. Indeed, the pump
light and the signal light is combined in the spatial dimension in
the case of the pump combiner for the cladding pumped MC-
Typical pump laser
EDFA. It is a significant advantage, considering the efficiency
sticss
characteristics
of optical amplification. Therefore, higher optical amplification
efficiency per core of the cladding pumped MC-EDFA
comparable with that of the conventional core pumped SC-
Operating current
Operatin
O urre EDFA can be expected in the future.
Power iinefficient
f type has been investigated. Reference [47] shows the optical
SDM sharing amplification performance of the cladding pumped MC-EDFA
200 250 300 free-optics type pump combiner and splitter are used. In that
case, the optical gain and the maximum output optical power is
improved by 3.5 dB without degradation of Noise Figure (NF)
as shown in Fig. 5. Indeed, the improvement depends on the
operation condition of the cladding pumped MC-EDFA. In the
case of Fig. 5, the optical pump power was 19.1 W and input
optical power was -15 dBm/core. Besides, the stability of the
TCP-MC-EDFA has been already investigated [48]; as reported,
the difference of the received pre-FEC (Forward Error
25
Pump = 19.1W
Pin = -15dBm
24
23
Optical Gain [dB]
3.5dB
22
21
20
19 without pump recycling
with pump recycling
18
1540 1545 1550 1555 1560 1565
Wavelength [nm]
Fig. 5. Improvement of the optical gain by using TCP-7c-EDFA is use

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