Tunability and monitoring of chromatic dispersion and PMD in optical networks

High-bit-rate (/spl ges/10 Gb/s/channel) transmission systems are highly susceptible to deleterious optical-fiber-based effects, such as chromatic dispersion, polarization-mode dispersion (PMD), and nonlinearities. Systems are designed such that these degrading effects are either minimized or compensated. This paper deals with the need in /spl ges/40 Gb/s/channel optical networks for: (i) tunable dispersion compensation, and (ii) dynamic monitoring of the signal degrading effects.