Abstract

Simple fiber optic communication systems can be implemented using energy modulation of isolated time-limited pulses. Fundamental solitons are one possible solution for such pulses which offer a fundamental advantage: they preserve their shape along the channel. Furthermore, a simple energy detector can be used at the receiver to detect the transmitted information. However, systems based on energy modulation of solitons are not competitive in terms of data rates. This is partly due to the fact that the effective time duration of a soliton depends on its chosen amplitude. In this paper, we propose to replace fundamental solitons by new time-limited waveforms that can be detected using an energy detector, and that are immune to fiber distortions. Our proposed solution relies on the prolate spheroidal wave functions and a numerical optimization routine. Time-limited waveforms that undergo minimum time broadening along an optical fiber are obtained and shown to outperform fundamental solitons. In the case of binary transmission and a single span of fiber, we report rate increases of 33.8% and 12% over lossy and lossless fibers, respectively. Furthermore, we show that the transmission rate of the proposed system increases as the number of used energy levels increases, which is not the case for fundamental solitons due to their effective time-amplitude constraint. For example, rate increases of 164% and 70% over lossy and lossless fibers respectively are reported when using four energy levels.

Bragg solitons in the nonlinear Schrödinger limit: experiment and theory

B. J. Eggleton, C. Martijn de Sterke, and R. E. Slusher
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 16(4) 587-599 (1999)

Beneficial use of spectral broadening resulting from the nonlinearity of the fiber-optic channel

Eado Meron, Mark Shtaif, and Meir Feder
Opt. Lett. 37(21) 4458-4460 (2012)

Impact of off-resonant nonlinearities on pulse propagation in dielectric bulk material: limits of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Martin Schaarschmidt and Andreas Knorr
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 23(11) 2342-2347 (2006)

Adjoint sensitivity analysis approach for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Mahmoud M. T. Maghrabi, Mohamed H. Bakr, and Shiva Kumar
Opt. Lett. 44(16) 3940-3943 (2019)

Dispersive perturbations of solitons of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation

J. P. Gordon
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 9(1) 91-97 (1992)