Dispersion-Managed Optical Links Combined with Asymmetrical Optical Phase Conjugation for Compensating for Distorted WDM Signals

Abstract

The combination of dispersion management (DM) and midway optical phase conjugation (OPC) is one of the promising techniques for compensating for optical signal distortion due to group velocity dispersion and nonlinear fiber effects. However, in this combination technique, midway OPC restricts the flexible optical link configuration. Therefore, the possibility of implementing the flexible optical link configuration with non-midway OPC applied to complete inline DM links is investigated in this study. It is confirmed that although the compensation using non-midway OPC for the distorted WDM channels is less effective than that using midway OPC, when non-midway OPC is placed at positions closer to the transmitters, the deployment of precompensation (i.e., the sequence of DCF + SMF)–OPC–postcompensation (i.e., the sequence of SMF + DCF) is more advantageous for the compensation. On the other hand, inverse deployment with respect to OPC (i.e., postcompensation–OPC–precompensation) is more advantageous when non-midway OPC is placed at positions closer to the receivers.