Integration of nonlinearity-management and dispersion-management for pulses in fiber-optic links

We introduce a model of a long-haul fiber-optic link that uses a combination of the nonlinearity- and dispersion-compensation (management) to stabilize nonsoliton pulses. The compensation of the accumulated fiber nonlinearity, and simultaneously pulse reshaping, which helps to suppress the inter-symbol interference (ISI, i.e., blurring of blank spaces between adjacent pulses), are performed by second-harmonic-generating (SHG) modules, which are periodically inserted together with amplifiers. We demonstrate that the dispersion-management (DM), which was not included in an earlier considered model, drastically improves stability of the pulses. The stable-transmission length for an isolated pulse, which was less than 10 fiber spans with the use of the nonlinearity-management only, becomes indefinitely long. It is demonstrated too that the pulse is quite robust against fluctuations of its initial parameters, and the scheme operates efficiently in a very broad parameter range. The interaction between pulses can be safely suppressed for the transmission distance exceeding 16 spans (similar or equal to1000 km). The smallest temporal separation between adjacent pulses, which is necessary to prevent the ISI, attains a minimum in the case of moderate DM, similar to known results for the DM solitons. The mutually induced distortion of co-propagating pulses being accounted for by the emission of radiation, a plausible way to further increase the stable-transmission limit is to introduce bandpass filters. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.