Abstract

Four-wave mixing (FWM)¹ is a severe degrading effect for Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM) fiber links, especially when the chromatic dispersion or Group Velocity Dispersion (GVD) is close to zero. As a result, the potential of the WDM technique in achieving high capacity and in improving network flexibility and functionality, is limited when the propagation occurs in links encompassing Dispersion Shifted (DS) fibers and optical amplifiers with the bandwidth containing the zero dispersion wavelength. A potentially simple technique to reduce the FWM impact consists in limiting the pulse overlapping along the propagation length.² In order to optimize such a method, in this work the FWM process has been investigated considering pulsed signals.

© 2000 Optical Society of America