Pseudo-symmetrically Dispersion-Managed Optical Transmission Links with Midway OPC for Compensating for Distorted WDM Signals

The system performance improvement in dispersion managed (DM) links combined with optical phase conjugator (OPC) for compensating for optical signal distortion due to group velocity dispersion and nonlinear fiber effects has been reported. However, in DM link combined OPC, the equalities of the lengths of single-mode fibers (SMFs), the length of dispersion compensating fibers (DCFs), the dispersion coefficient of DCF, and the residual dispersion per span (RDPS) with respect to an OPC restrict a flexible link configuration. Thus, in this paper, we propose a flexible optical link configuration with inequalities of link parameters, the so-called “pseudo-symmetric configuration.” Simulation results show that, in the restricted RDPS range of 450 ps/nm to 800 ps/nm, the improvement in the system performance of the proposed pseudo-symmetrically configured optical links is better than that of the asymmetrically configured optical links. Consequently, we confirmed that the proposed pseudo-symmetric configuration is effective and useful for implementing a reconfigurable long-haul wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) network.