A comparison study of the Shannon channel capacity of various nonlinear optical fibers

A comparative study of the Shannon channel capacity is presented for a dispersion-free fiber, a fiber with constant dispersion, and a fiber with variable dispersion. Improvement of the capacity by optical phase conjugation (OPC) is also investigated. Simple scaling laws are prescribed for the dependence of the optimal capacity on various system settings such as number of spans, number of channels, noise power, channel width, strength of chromatic dispersion, bandwidth of an OPC device, etc.