Dispersion Management and Optical Phase Conjugation in Optical Transmission Links with a Randomly Distributed Single-Mode Fiber Length

Suppressing or mitigating signal distortion due to group velocity dispersion and optical Kerr effects is necessary in ultrahigh speed and long-haul wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission systems. Dispersion management (DM), optical phase conjugation (OPC), and the combination of these two are promising techniques to compensate for signal distortion. In this paper, to implement a flexible optical WDM network, a new optical link configuration with a randomly distributed single-mode fiber (SMF) length and fixed residual dispersion per span in the combination of DM and OPC is proposed and investigated. The simulation results show that the best net residual dispersion (NRD) in the proposed optical links is +10 ps/nm, which is independent of preand postcompensation. The effective launch power of the WDM channel is increased more in the optical links with NRD = +10 ps/nm controlled by only precompensation. Furthermore, the system performance difference between the proposed optical link configuration with the best NRD and the conventional optical link with uniform distribution of the SMF length had little significance. Consequently, it is confirmed that the proposed optical link configuration with the best NRD is effective and useful for implementing a reconfigurable long-haul WDM network.