Long-Haul Dispersion Managed Soliton WDM Systems Towards Terabit Capacity

Abstract

Long-distance WDM soliton system transmitting terabit-per-second capacity is discussed. In order to achieve cost-effective Tb/s transmission systems, the data rate for each channel was set at 20 Gb/s and the dispersion-managed soliton transmission was employed for long-haul transmission of such high-speed signals. The dense WDM transmission with 0.8 nm channel spacing has been realized by adopting the polarization interleave multiplexing, which effectively suppressed the waveform degradation induced by the cross phase modulation. To transmit all the WDM soliton signals simultaneously, we developed a wideband and dispersion-flattened transmission line. The 44 nm transmission bandwidth was achieved by use of both 1.55 and 1.58 mum optical repeaters, and the chromatic dispersion difference was as small as 0.1 ps/nm/km by a hybrid fiber span of SMF and a dispersion-slope-compensating negative dispersion fiber (NDF). With the developed transmission line, 20 Gb/s 55-channel-WDM dispersion-managed soliton transmission was successfully Conducted over 3020 km.