Dispersion Managed Optical Transmission Links with an Artificial Distribution of the SMF Length and Residual Dispersion per Span

Dispersion management (DM), optical phase conjugation (OPC), and the combination of DM and OPC are promising techniques to compensate for optical signal distortion due to group velocity dispersion and nonlinear Kerr effects. The system performance improvement in DM links combined with OPC has been reported; however, the fixed residual dispersion per span (RDPS) usually used in these links restricts the flexibility of link configuration. Thus, in this paper, a flexible optical link configuration with artificially distributed single-mode fiber (SMF) lengths and RDPS in the combination of DM and OPC is proposed. Simulation results show that the best artificial distribution pattern is the gradually descending distribution of SMF lengths and the gradually ascending distribution of RDPS, as the number of fiber spans is increased, regardless of the average RDPS, the optimal net residual dispersion, and the dispersion coefficient of the dispersion compensating fiber.