Timing Jitter in a Long-Haul 40 Gb/s Dispersion-Managed Soliton System

Abstract

Increasing the data rate in optical transmission systems from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s poses many challenges. Both experiments and numerical simulations face new problems that require a detailed understanding of the system limitations, Physical effects that were already present at 10 Gb/s, but could be neglected, have to be taken into account at 40 Gb/s. The error-free optical transmission of the signal becomes more complicated to achieve. First, pulses are usually shorter, so that the optical bandwidth is larger than at 10 Gb/s and hence solitons interact more strongly with ASE noise. Second, as a consequence of the reduced pulse spacing, inter-symbol interference (ISI) typically becomes more severe. The tolerance of the system performance to variation of parameters such as path average dispersion, amplifier location, filter bandwidth, and optical power is much smaller than at 10 Gb/s.