Abstract

With the deployment of the first 40 Gbit/s communication systems in the years to come, a growing attention is being paid to transmission lines working at higher bit rates, typically 160 Gbit/s and more [1,2]. In particular, the fundamental issue raised by the operators consists to know until which bit rate they could upgrade their existing terrestrial systems without changing all the pre-installed optical cables. To highlight this point, we investigate in this prospective work, and by means of numerical simulations, the fundamental limits of the terrestrial RZ data transmission systems based on SMF/DCF dispersion map for bit rates ranging from 160 Gbit/s to 1.28 Tbit/s. Figure la illustrates the classical terrestrial transmission link considered here. Each span consists of 100 km of SMF, an Erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) with gain Gi, 17 km of DCF and a second EDFA with gain G₂=G₁. The system also includes pre- and postcompensation stages. After filtering and detection, the system performance was characterized using the usual Q-factor.

© 2007 IEEE