Comparison of the dispersion allocated WDM (10 Gbit/s×10 channels) optical soliton and NRZ systems using a Q map

We compared the transmission quality of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) soliton and WDM nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) systems numerically by using a Q contour map for WDM. The bit rate was set at 100 Gbit/s (10 Gbit/s×10 channels). We studied the effect of dispersion allocation in detail and found that there is a significant improvement in the transmission quality of WDM soliton systems when a large dispersion allocation is used. Such an improvement was not obtained in the WDM NRZ system. We show that a dispersion allocated WDM soliton system using 1.3 μm standard fiber has greater potential for increasing the transmission distance than a WDM NRZ system. This result confirms the experimental result reported by Le Guen et al. [D. Le Guen, A. O'Hare, S. Del Burgo, D. Grot, F. Favre, T. Georges, Narrow band 640 Gbit/s soliton WDM transmission over 1200 km of standard fibre with 100 km-21 dB amplifier spans, European Conf. on Optical Communications '98, Madrid, Post Deadline Papers, 1998, pp. 59-63].