Collision-induced timing jitter reduction by periodic dispersion management in soliton WDM transmission

A major source of errors in soliton WDM transmission is collision-induced timing jitter. Because standard transmission lines have lumped amplification, the four-wave mixing fields from soliton collisions grow uncontrollably even when the spacing between amplifiers is much smaller than the soliton collision length, adding amplitude and timing jitter to the jitter due to ideal soliton collisions. Previously, it was proposed to use dispersion-decreasing fiber to reduce the four-wave mixing fields. In this paper, we show that dispersion management is a viable alternative to dispersion-decreasing fiber. Our computational results show that solitons in dispersion-managed fibers can actually suffer less impairment than solitons in ideal dispersion-decreasing fibers with the same average dispersion when the channel spacing is <10 pulse spectral widths