Dispersion compensation design for lightwave systems

The need to better utilize latent capacity in embedded fiber networks has motivated recent work on dispersion compensation. As illustrated there are three basic strategies for attacking dispersion: (A) predistortion at the transmitter; (B) post-detection compensation in the receiver; and (C) direct compensation in the optical domain. Although in principle all three approaches can completely correct for dispersion under certain modulation and detection formats, recent experimental demonstrations have begun to reveal some of the practical limitations of each approach