Higher bit rates for dispersion-managed soliton communication systems via constrained coding

Constrained coding as a method to increase the data rate in dispersion-managed soliton (DMS) communication systems is proposed. This approach is well known and widely used in the context of magnetic and optical recording systems. This paper shows that it is also applicable to DMS systems due to certain similarities between the underlying physical channels. Since timing jitter is an important error-generating mechanism for solitons, a coding scheme specifically designed to combat pulse shifts is also presented, and its properties in the framework of a particular information-theoretic channel model are analyzed. A connection between the model used and the real physical channel is then established. Next, the coded system is compared with the original one from the channel capacity point of view with the help of numerical examples. Finally, the fact that the application of constrained coding may alleviate soliton pulse-to-pulse interaction is exploited. This, in turn, opens the door to the usage of higher-than-usual map strengths and ultimately leads to a significant increase of up to 50% in the bit rate