2R regeneration based on dispersion-imbalanced loop mirror and its applications in WDM systems

2R regeneration based on dispersion-imbalanced loop mirror is investigated including the characteristics of transfer function, output extinction ratio, initial chirp, predispersion, and WDM signals transfer functions. Theoretical results show that the input peak power is a critical parameter for the dispersion-imbalanced loop mirror (DILM) and furthermore, to guarantee the multiwavelength operation of the DILM, limitations due to accumulated dispersion and dispersion slope have to be considered. Our experiment demonstrates that 6/spl times/10 Gb/s WDM signals can be successfully regenerated by a novel 2R regenerator based on a DILM consisting of a single mode fiber (SMF) and a highly nonlinear dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) after WDM transmission over 40 km SMF of the WDM signals.