Control of soliton-soliton and soliton-dispersive wave interactions in high bit-rate communication systems

The authors present numerical simulations of the 80 Gbit/s soliton transmission experiment (Electron. Lett. 1994. 30, pp. 1777-1778) operating in a regime beyond the average-soliton limit and show that dispersive waves and soliton interaction limit the total transmission distance to ~500 km in agreement with the experimental results. Two ways of improving the system performance are presented and discussed. The use of fast saturable absorbers can eliminate interaction between solitons and dispersive waves and increase the transmission distance above 1000 km. The soliton-soliton interaction can be made virtually ineffective by using synchronous modulation. Such a lightwave system can transmit a high bit-rate (50-100 Gbit/s) soliton signal over transoceanic distances while keeping amplifier spacings larger than the soliton period