Dispersion-compensating fiber: is there merit in the figure of merit?

Summary form only given. This paper investigates how dispersion, loss, and effective area of a dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) interplay to determine the performance of a system, and introduces the new figure of merit F/sub nl/, which describes the quality of a DCF from a system performance point of view. This is accomplished by evaluating the performance degradation that a DCF with given values of dispersion, loss and effective area introduces compared with a system with an ideal dispersion compensator.