Interchannel Crosstalk Reduction in an Analog Fiber Link Using Dispersion Management

It has previously been shown that dispersion compensation can dramatically affect the interchannel crosstalk in a multichannel analog fiber transmission link. In this work, we use a genetic algorithm to find five-segment dispersion maps that yield low crosstalk levels over two octaves of microwave-frequency bandwidth when amplitude modulation is used. The genetic algorithm suggests that optimal dispersion maps have low residual dispersion. Despite the genetic algorithm's ability to optimize dispersion maps with many fibers, it is possible to obtain similar crosstalk levels from a simpler two-segment design whose dispersion is fully compensated.