Dispersion elimination and harmonic behavior in optical networks

Eliminating dispersion effects fast is a crucial concern when building next generation optical networks. Dispersion penalty has been investigated widely in 1550nm fiber-optical links transmitting different kind of signals. However, only a few papers addressed the harmonics generation effect. This paper presents theoretical and experimental results on the estimation of harmonic effects in the transmission. An approach is presented in this paper to overcome the radio frequency carrier suppression, based on the joint effect of SOA chirp, chromatic dispersion and nonlinearities in optical link. The frequency notches caused by the dispersion-induced carrier suppression effect may be sharply alleviated and the performance of the transmitted digital signal can be improved. The saturated SOA also affects the level and nature of harmonics.