Effect of dispersion on spectrum-sliced WDM systems

In spectrum-sliced WDM systems the carrier signals for the individual channels are obtained by filtering a wideband noise source. Because of the inherent fluctuations of the noise-like source the channel bandwidth, must be large compared to the bit rate. Such systems are then susceptible to dispersion, and one expects an optimum value to balance signal fluctuation and dispersion effects. The purpose of this paper is to describe and present the results of an idealized analytical model for this problem, with results expressed in terms of normalized parameters. We consider the case of a broadband noise source that is spectrally sliced by a rectangular filter