On the benefits brought by fiber chromatic dispersion in coherent communication networks

Abstract In this letter, the reduction of nonlinear distortions, arising from large fiber chromatic dispersion, is investigated numerically for polarization-multiplexed (PM) signals in DSP-based coherent communication systems. We find that the impact of chromatic dispersion on nonlinearity reduction is almost same for PM-BPSK/QPSK, and PM-16QAM/64QAM signals. We also show that the minimum dispersion coefficient of transmission fiber required to reduce the nonlinear impairments as much as possible is approximately 48ps/nm/km for PM-BPSK/QPSK and PM-16QAM/64QAM signals.