Abstract

Dispersion management has been shown to be a powerful technique to mitigate nonlinear impairments in high bit-rate optical transmission systems. It consists of a careful tuning of the amount and the location of small pieces of dispersion compensating fiber (GVD), in the transmitter (pre-compensation), within the repeaters (in-line compensation) and in the receiver (post-compensation). As it is a three-parameter optimization, the design of dispersion-managed links can advantageously be done by numerical simulations,^1,2,3 but a full investigation is very time-consuming.⁴ To reduce the computation time for 40 Gbit/s transmission systems, very few simple rules have been proposed, to link pre-, in-line and post-compensation.¹

© 2002 Optical Society of America