Stretched-pulse optical fiber communications

We compare numerically long-distance propagation of two types of nonlinear pulses: a stretched pulse in a fiber with alternating normal and anomalous dispersion and a soliton in a fiber with uniformly anomalous dispersion. Numerical evaluation of timing jitter and Q factor reveals that stretched pulses can be propagated over longer distances than solitons with the same (averaged) fiber dispersion in the presence of weak fixed-frequency filtering. We also examine pulse-to-pulse interactions between stretched pulses and the influence of fluctuations of the fiber dispersion.