Suppressing modulation instability in midway optical phase conjugation systems by using dispersion compensation

Modulation instability (MI) limits the transmission capacity of fiber systems using optical phase conjugation (OPC). A midway OPC system with periodic dispersion compensation (DC) where fiber parameters and the local path-averaged power are distributed symmetrically with respect to the position of OPC, is proposed to cope with the MI effect. The analytical solution for evaluating the effect of MI shows that the MI effect can be suppressed considerably in such an OPC system with a strong DC configuration. The improvement of the system performance is confirmed by numerical simulations.