A dispersion management scheme for reducing SOA-induced crosstalk in WDM links

The penalty imposed on the multichannel wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) link employing cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) caused by the cross-gain modulation (XGM) in the SOAs is analyzed and shown to depend on the dispersion management scheme utilized in the link. Based on the results of the analysis, a novel dispersion management scheme is proposed to prevent the repetition of the bit patterns at each SOA stage. Numerical calculations show that with the proposed dispersion management scheme, the crosstalk is mitigated and the performance is significantly improved.