The potential of solitons for 10 Gbit/s communications in standard fibre systems

This paper studies the use of solitons in a communication system over standard fibre with relatively long 36 km amplifier spacings at 10 Gbit/s by numerical simulation. Theories developed for long systems predict that the system studied should not transmit solitons at this data rate, but the simulations show that for these shorter systems (a few hundred kilometers) soliton operation is possible. Although the system can be made to work up to 200 km, the optical powers required would be somewhat higher than currently desirable, so the use of a little dispersion compensation, far less than that required by a fully compensated system, was studied, with the added advantage of improving the operating window for the solitons both in terms of distance and pulse width. The authors conclude that there is much potential for upgrading systems of a few hundred kilometers to high data rates in this way