The demand for increased data and communications services is driving many carriers to upgrade their legacy optical systems in the metro-metro-edge region of the communication network. When such upgrades require extending the transmission distance, dispersion compensation techniques are required that compensate for signal degradations while conforming to tight operating budgets. We have used both channelized and non-channelized, fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based dispersion-compensating modules (DCM) to compensate for the chromatic dispersion of 60-km fiber links operating at 1550 nm. Using typical SONET/SDH lasers with a large spectral linewidth (~1 nm at the 20-dB point), including significant chirp, our BER experiments show that the system performance depends on whether the grating-based compensators are channelized or non-channelized. Our measurements show that the performance of FBG-based channelized DCMs is a function of the amplitude of the dispersion ripple at the boundaries of the channel bandwidth. Non-channelized DCMs performed well despite their exhibiting more chromatic-dispersion and insertion-loss ripple in the immediate proximity of the laser center wavelength. First-order system simulation was found to be in general agreement with these experimental observations and singles out the large variations in chromatic dispersion at the boundaries of the channel as the primary reason for the degraded system performance.

Date Published: 13 October 2005
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 5970, Photonic Applications in Devices and Communication Systems, 59702X (13 October 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.628845

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5970:
Photonic Applications in Devices and Communication Systems
Peter Mascher; John C. Cartledge; Andrew Peter Knights; David V. Plant, Editor(s)