Abstract

Increasing the data rate in optical transmission systems from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s poses many challenges. Both experiments and numerical simulations face new problems that require a detailed understanding of the system limitations, Physical effects that were already present at 10 Gb/s, but could be neglected, have to be taken into account at 40 Gb/s. The error-free optical transmission of the signal becomes more complicated to achieve. First, pulses are usually shorter, so that the optical bandwidth is larger than at 10 Gb/s and hence solitons interact more strongly with ASE noise. Second, as a consequence of the reduced pulse spacing, inter-symbol interference (ISI) typically becomes more severe.¹ The tolerance of the system performance to variation of parameters such as path average dispersion, amplifier location, filter bandwidth, and optical power is much smaller than at 10 Gb/s.

© 2002 Optical Society of America