Wavelength division multiplexing in long-haul transmission systems

The erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) has had a profound impact on the design, operation and performance of transoceanic cable transmission, and is central to the expected proliferation of cable systems. Important strides have been made in areas of dispersion management, gain equalization, modulation formats and polarization scrambling which have made possible the demonstration of large data transmission capacity. In this paper we review the recent advances in these techniques, and report a transoceanic length transmission experiment with 160 Gb/s total capacity