Impact of dispersion fluctuations on 40-Gb/s dispersion-managed lightwave systems

We study numerically the impact of random dispersion fluctuations on the performance of 40-Gb/s dispersionmanaged lightwave systems designed using either the chirped return-to-zero or the soliton format and employing backward-pumped distributed Raman amplification. We consider two-section dispersion maps with (beta)/sub 2/ = +- 4 and +- 8 ps/sup 2//km and show that the Q parameter decreases rapidly in both cases as the nonlinear effects become stronger. The impact of dispersion fluctuations can be reduced by lowering the average input power, but the system length is then limited by amplifier noise.