Scale of WDM transport network using different types of fibers

This paper describes a statistical calculation method for transmission limits taking into consideration dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) zero-dispersion wavelength deviation for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems employing unequal channel spacing. For example, the upper limit of fiber input power achieving a bit error rate (BER) less than 10/sup -12/ shows a 3 dB improvement when the standard deviation is increased from 1 to 8 nm when the transmission distance with a 80 km repeater spacing is 640 km. Furthermore, the network scales employing 1.55 /spl mu/m DSF, nondispersion-shifted fiber (N-DSF) and conventional single-mode fiber (SMF) are shown. Finally, a method for estimating the transmission limit for a receiver with different sensitivity, different node architecture, and different bit rates is described.