Impact of fiber grating dispersion on WDM system performance

Summary form only given. Fiber gratings have become one of the important optical filtering devices in wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) communication systems. These filters are inherently dispersive elements, which affect the pulses propagating through or reflecting off them by spreading them in time. This dispersion-induced pulse broadening leads ultimately to transmission penalties. Recently the effect of fiber grating dispersion on neighboring transmitted channels was analyzed and it was found that the increasing dispersion near the grating band edge leads to unacceptable pulse broadening and therefore to a lower limit on channel spacing for a given bandwidth of modulation. In this paper, we present the results of a system experiment in which both the transmission and reflection are investigated. 10 Gbit/s system measurements confirm the detrimental effects of fiber grating dispersion close to the band edges. These dispersion effects may ultimately impose limits on the channel bandwidth to channel spacing ratio (spectral utilization).