Chromatic dispersion compensation in coherent optical communications

Chromatic dispersion compensation techniques in coherent transmission systems are reviewed and discussed for potential feasibility. The key compensation device is the wideband delay equalizer. It is shown that stripline-type delay equalizers have the potential for compensating distortion up to 10 Gb/s using a conventional 1.3- mu m zero-dispersion single-mode fiber at 1.5 mu m. Chromatic dispersion is successfully compensated with a stripline delay for CPFSK transmission at 4 and 6 Gb/s over 200 km of 1.3- mu m zero-dispersion single-mode fiber at 1.55 mu m. The bandwidth requirement of the compensation techniques for heterodyne detection is more than 10 GHz. However, it is difficult to realize such broadband receivers. Therefore, phase diversity detection with dispersion compensation is a promising scheme.<
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