Abstract

Current interest in the use of optical solitons in high data rate communications centres around their use in long distance, typically trans-oceanic, systems with low group velocity dispersion fibres.¹ The potential application of solitons in nondispersion shifted fibre systems is not often considered as the dispersions of such systems (around 15 ps/(nmkm) at the low loss, 1.55 μm wavelength region) leads to short soliton periods, giving pulse breakup from amplifier perturbations,² pulse walk-off, and collisions from soliton interactions, and requires high optical powers to support fundamental solitons. Amplifier output powers of a few milliwatts are typically considered for systems applications, whereas solitons in standard fibre systems may require greater than 10 mW.¹ There is much interest in upgrading the large existing standard fibre base to higher data capacity.³ This paper studies the use of solitons in upgrading such systems to 10 Gbit/s and considers the use of dispersion compensation to overcome the problems found.

© 1994 IEEE