Abstract

In recent years, several groups have proposed the creation of a truly all-optical long distance transmission system-one without electronic regenerators—by periodically injecting cw pump power into the fiber to create a loss compensating Raman gain and by transmitting the information as a stream of nondispersive pulses known as solitons.^1,2 Such a system would have many advantages including the following: First. with wavelength multiplexing (easily achieved in the all-optical system), it would allow for transmission of 100 Gbit/s or more on a single fiber over intercontinental distances. Second, a surplus of laser pump diodes would allow for a certain natural fail-safe quality in stark contrast to a conventional system, where failure of just one regenerator causes the entire system to go down.

© 1989 Optical Society of America