Abstract

In 1992 an experimental 10-Gbit/s transmission over 125.8 km using dispersion-supported transmission (DST) was presented.¹ The basic idea was that a frequency modulation (FM) at the transmitter would transform into a detectable amplitude modulation (AM) during propagation along the fiber because of the chromatic-dispersion-induced linear FM-to-AM conversion. The analytical results in Ref. I predicted an ultimate transmission length of approximately 150 km at 10 Gbit/s, achievable by minimum-shift keying (MSK), in which the FM index m = 0.5. Surprisingly, it was recently announced that transmission over 252 km at 10 Gbit/s has been achieved by using linear DST.² This apparent contradiction motivated us to examine the underlying principle of operation more carefully. In particular, we investigated the role of the nonlinear self-phase modulation (SPM) in this scheme.

© 1994 Optical Society of America