Abstract

Dispersion management is a well-established means for improving the performance of nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) data transmission for optical fiber communications [1]. In these systems, dispersion management is used to avoid four-photon mixing. Recent work has demonstrated that dispersion management in soliton transmission systems is also a promising technique for improving system performance [2] – [4]. By keeping the local dispersion high and the average dispersion low, it is possible to reduce timing jitter while having sufficient pulse energy to avoid amplitude errors. We report here for the first time that it is possible to stably transmit solitons using a dispersion map in which almost all of the fiber is in the normal regime but in which the average dispersion is anomalous. Stable transmission over 28,000 km at 8 Gbit/s was experimentally observed.

© 1996 Optical Society of America