A filtering approach for reducing timing jitter due to the acoustic effect

We introduce a signal processing approach to compensate for the timing jitter produced by the acoustic effect in soliton communications. The other main sources of timing jitter, the Gordon-Haus effect and the polarization effect, are inherently stochastic. By contrast, the acoustic effect is deterministic and becomes the dominant source of bit error rates in standard soliton systems when the bit rates are more than 10 Gb/s and the transmission distance is more than several thousand kilometers. We exploit the deterministic nature of the acoustic effect to introduce a scheme that predicts the amount of timing jitter as a function of the previous transmitted bits and uses the information to adjust the sampling period of the received soliton pulses. We demonstrate successful application of the scheme by simulations and discuss implementation issues.