Interactions between dispersion-managed solitons in optical-time-division-multiplexed systems

Nonlinear interactions between neighboring pulses in an optical time division multiplexed (OTDM) system may cause timing jitter of the signal pulse, which degrades transmission quality. A dispersion-managed (DM) soliton is a stable pulse in a DM line and is less influenced by various nonlinear effects than conventional solitons. On the other hand, interactions between DM solitons depend on the strength of the DM line, which is defined as the length of DM period times the variation of the fiber dispersion, and the transmission quality is degraded mainly due to the interactions in a strongly DM line. In this paper, the interactions between DM solitons are studied theoretically and numerically, and we then show that alternating the phases or amplitudes of pulses in the time sequence is effective for reducing the interactions. © 2001 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 84(6): 24–29, 2001