Performance improvement of 40 Gbit/s optical soliton transmission system by employing all-optically regenerative repeater using nonlinear optical loop mirror

The performance improvement of a 40 Gbit/s soliton transmission system employing a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) as an all-optical regenerative repeater is investigated. The switching characteristic of the NOLM is optimized using our design strategies. By inserting the optical repeater where the eye-penalty of the transmitted signal becomes 1 dB, we achieve an improvement of 0.3 dB eye-penalty resulting in a further 480 km transmission distance.