Effect of fiber nonlinearity on long-distance transmission

Abstract

The effect of the weak refractive-index nonlinearity of optical fibers on pulse shape is investigated using computer simulations of long-distance transmission. Fiber losses are canceled by periodically spaced optical amplifiers whose spontaneous emission noise is, however, not included in the simulations. The analysis is confined to normal pulses and does not consider solitons. Several conclusions are drawn. (1) If wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) of two channels is used in a uniform fiber without dispersion fluctuations, catastrophic buildup of four-wave mixing occurs if one primary channel is located at the zero-dispersion wavelength. (2) If two pulses with different carrier frequencies collide in a uniform fiber with no gain or loss discontinuities, their four-wave mixing products reach a peak during complete pulse overlap, but this spurious power dies away as the pulses separate. (3) Two-channel WDM transmission of light modulated in amplitude-shift keying format appears feasible at 2.5 GB/s over distances of 7500 km.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>