Next generation fiber-wireless communication paradigms will require new technologies to address the current limitations to massive capacity, connectivity and flexibility. Multicore optical fibers, which were conceived for high-capacity digital communications, can bring numerous advantages to fiber-wireless radio access architectures. Besides radio over fiber parallel distribution and multiple antenna connectivity, multicore fibers can implement, at the same time, a variety of broadband processing functionalities for microwave and millimeter-wave signals. This approach leads to the novel concept of "fiber-distributed signal processing". In particular, we capitalize on the spatial parallelism inherent to multicore fibers to implement a broadband tunable true time delay line, which is the basis of multiple processing applications such as signal filtering, arbitrary waveform generation and squint-free radio beamsteering. We present the design of trench-assisted heterogeneous multicore fibers composed of cores featuring individual spectral group delays and chromatic dispersion profiles. Besides fulfilling the requirements for true time delay line operation, the MCFs are optimized in terms of higher-order dispersion, crosstalk and bend sensitivity. Microwave photonics signal processing will benefit from the performance stability, 2D operation versatility and compactness brought by the reported fiberintegrated solution.
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