Abstract

Soliton transmission over long distances has been demonstrated experimentally by using recirculation in fiber loops. Pseudorandom bit sequences (PRBS) were transmitted over distances as great as 15 000 km by using an optically time-multiplexed 5-Gbit/s signal.¹ By adding wavelength-division multiplexing, transmission at bit rates as high as 10 GBit/s has been reported.¹ Previous experiments have used mode-locked fiber-ring lasers,¹ external modulation,² mode-locked semiconductor lasers in external cavities,³ or gain-switched DFB lasers for generating the soliton pulses.⁴ In spite of these results, no transmission system that uses solitons has yet been installed for commercial use. As is indicated by the variety of sources used in previous experiments, it is still not clear which soliton source is the most suitable. Previously, we have shown propagation of an unmodulated train of solitons generated by a mode-locked monolithic extended- cavity laser over distances as great as 15 000 km.⁵ In this paper we are reporting for the first time to our knowledge soliton transmission results with bit-error-rate measurements by using this soliton source for single-channel data transmission at 8.2 Gbit/s.

© 1993 Optical Society of America