Influence of input power mismatch on time domain detection of solitonic components

The capacity of fiber optic transmission links is limited by nonlinearities due to the Kerr effect. Recently a new type of communication based on the Nonlinear Fourier Transform, which is offering the use of two types of spectra, a continuous one and a discrete one, was proposed. Coherent optical receivers are the enabler for this communication scheme as an extension of former eigenvalue communication using direct detection. A prerequisite of the theory is a lossless fiber channel. To cope with varying power along the real fiber link the path average method was introduced. Using the average gain along the fiber and its local deviation a correction coefficient for the nonlinear effects in the fiber is calculated. Nevertheless the sensitivity to input power mismatch is expected to be high. Therefore as a reference a 2 dimensional modulation format using a single eigenvalue with different magnitudes and phases of the discrete spectral amplitude is transmitted over 2639km and detected in time domain to prove the feasibility of this detection scheme with a BER of 6.1 10(exp -5) and give a reference for future nonlinear Fourier domain detection. A comparison with a short range pure NFT detection after 754 km do not exhibit such a strong input power dependence providing acceptable bit error rates.