Minimization of the pulse's timing jitter in a dispersion-compensated WDM system

Abstract

We address the problem of the collision-induced crosstalk between pulses in a dispersion-compensated WDM system composed of a periodic array of cells that include two or three fiber segments. Both the cross- and self-phase-modulation nonlinearities are taken into account. A semi-analytical approximation and direct simulations are used to calculate the frequency shift (FS) of colliding pulses, and to search for conditions which provide for minima of the FS and the temporal shift (TS), including the most promising possibility of minimizing both shifts simultaneously. Semi-analytical results, obtained by means of the perturbation theory, are in qualitative agreement with the numerical findings, especially in regimes near the optimum. In searching for the FS and TS minima, we investigate the effect of changing the initial width and chirp of the pulse, position of the amplifier within the dispersion–compensation period, group-velocity difference between the channels, allocation of the group-velocity-dispersion (GVD) inside the cell, and the average GVD. We conclude that a more sophisticated dispersion–compensation map, with three different local values of GVD, may be significantly more efficient than the one based on two different segments. A global FS minimum, with respect to the variation of all the parameters, is found.