Modelling WDM soliton transmission in dispersion-managed systems

We have shown that a soliton system with strong dispersion management is compatible with four 10 Gbit/s channel WDM up to 5000 km. The equivalent non-managed system gives unacceptable errors at 3000 km. No third order dispersion compensation or filtering was used and the channel spacings were up to 3.2 nn; a significant portion of the erbium doped fibre amplifier bandwidth. Third order dispersion has been identified as the major limiting effect. Third order dispersion compensation to maintain low dispersion across all the channels reduces the translation of collision induced frequency shifts into timing jitter, and hence allows increased transmission capacities