| Dispersion management has proven to be an important technique for designing lightwave communication systems as it can be used to lower the average dispersion of a fiber link even though the group-velocity dispersion is kept relatively large locally for suppressing four-wave mixing. The performance of modern dispersion-managed lightwave systems depends on a large number of factors. Gordon-Haus timing jitter, arising from the presence of amplified spontaneous emission noise, happens to be one of the major limiting factors for long-haul systems, especially at high bit rates exceeding 10 Gb/s. In this thesis, we analyze the role of distributed amplification in controlling timing jitter in dispersion-managed systems. We derive analytical expressions for the timing jitter at any position within the fiber link in the cases of ideal distributed and lumped amplifications and show the possibility of reducing timing jitter by up to 40% using Raman or erbium-based distributed amplification.; It has become apparent in recent years that the dispersion of an optical fiber, designed to have a fixed value, can vary over a considerable range because of unavoidable variations in the core diameter along the fiber length. Even though such axial variations are static, they can impact the system performance because of the nonlinear nature of the pulse propagation problem. Although dispersion fluctuations rarely impact a 10-Gb/s system, their role on the system performance must be considered for 40-Gb/s lightwave systems for which dispersion tolerance is relatively tight. In this thesis, we present the results of extensive numerical simulations performed to identify the impact of dispersion fluctuations on the performance of 40-Gb/s dispersion-managed lightwave systems, designed using either the chirped-return-to-zero or the soliton format and employing distributed Raman amplification.; We consider also the design of dispersion-managed soliton systems. We use the variational approach to derive approximate analytic expressions for the input pulse parameters and show the existence of a limiting bit rate, which depends only on the dispersion-map configuration. Finally, the design rules are proposed that allow the minimization of the intrachannel pulse interactions in a dispersion-managed soliton system. |
