Continuous demand for bandwidth-hungry applications has paved the way for mode division multiplexing (MDM) using few-mode fiber (FMF) as a promising candidate for increasing transmission capacity. In this talk, we discuss characterization, simulation, and experimental demonstration of MDM technology utilizing a two-mode fiber that supports the fundamental LP01 and the two-fold degenerate higher-order LP11 modes. We propose and experimentally demonstrate simple characterization techniques to quantify temporal statistics of the MDM system. We discuss a simulation framework for distributed modeling of different linear coupling processes in the presence of longitudinal variation of differential modal group delay in FMF. We then show simulation and experimental results of coherent two-mode transmission utilizing multi-input multi-output digital signal processing to mitigate the effects of system and channel impairments. Finally, we discuss results showing intensity modulation and direct detection based transmission in FMF for short-haul applications.