Abstract

There are two major distortion effects in long-distance optical- fiber transmission systems, namely, (a) the interaction between the Kerr effect and dispersion and (b) the nonlinear growth of amplified-spontaneous-emission (ASE) noise.¹ Operation away from the dispersion minimum (D < 0), with periodic dispersion compensation, has been proposed for decreasing these effects,^2,3 and several compensation techniques have recently been demonstrated.⁴ However, measurements and simulation results to date have been for specific choices of dispersion coefficient D and compensation distance L_c. By using numerical simulation, we evaluated how D and L_c should be chosen to optimize an approximate performance criteria, and we also considered the effect of imperfect compensation. Only second-order dispersion with D < 0 was considered because nonlinear ASE noise growth is smaller than for D > 0.⁵

© 1995 Optical Society of America