Abstract

Transoceanic soliton transmission with erbium doped fiber amplifier stages and no repeaters has to overcome amplifier noise in order to achieve acceptable bit-error rates. The optical power must be high enough to overcome the amplifier background noise and low enough to avoid the Gordon-Haus limit. This limit is caused by random frequency changes of the solitons upon passage through the ampliers that translate into timing jitter after propagation over long distances. These two bounds limit the range of acceptable transmission powers and may not allow for gradual detrioration of the fiber link. We have shown¹ that the insertion of passive filters can reduce the the timing jitter imposed by the Gordon-Haus effect. In addition, the linear noise contribution is filtered so that the available range of transmission powers is greatly increased. The bandwidth of the system linearly excited is greatly reduced. High bit-rate transmission with solitons is made possible only because the solitons recover their total spectral width after passage through each of the filters.

© 1992 Optical Society of America