Strong time jitter reduction using solitons in "1/z" dispersion managed fiber links

We propose and study a novel dispersion management method that permits the propagation of soliton pulses with a very low time jitter. The scheme assumes a chromatic dispersion that on average decreases with a 1/z law, where z is the propagation distance. The advantage of this method consists in the fact that at the end of the link the mean chromatic dispersion is very small and as a consequence the jitter can be deeply reduced, while at the beginning of the link the chromatic dispersion is high, hence the system can operate with a large input power that permits a good signal to noise ratio. The scheme is simply implemented by periodically compensating the chromatic dispersion with fiber pieces having different lengths. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved