Reduction of four-wave mixing crosstalk in WDM systems using unequally spaced channels

Crosstalk due to four-wave mixing (FWM) is the dominant nonlinear effect in long-haul multichannel optical communication systems employing dispersion-shifted fiber. A technique to design the channel frequency allocation in order to minimize the crosstalk due to FWM is presented. It is shown that suitable unequal channel separations can be found for which no four-wave mixing product term is superimposed on any of the transmitted channels. This is obtained at the expense of some expansion of the system bandwidth. Simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of this technique in a 10-channel, 10-Gb/s per channel, system.<>