Interchannel Crosstalk Reduction in an Analog Fiber Link Using Dispersion Management

It has previously been shown that dispersion compensation can dramatically affect the interchannel crosstalk in a multichannel analog fiber transmission link. In this work, we use a genetic algorithm to find five-segment dispersion maps that yield low crosstalk levels over two octaves of microwave-frequency bandwidth when amplitude modulation is used. The genetic algorithm suggests that optimal dispersion maps have low residual dispersion. Despite the genetic algorithm´s ability to optimize dispersion maps with many fibers, it is possible to obtain similar crosstalk levels from a simpler two-segment design whose dispersion is fully compensated.