Fiber nonlinearity compensation using optical phase conjugation in dispersion-managed coherent transmission systems

In the discretely amplified transmission systems with erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, the system performance of nonlinearity-compensated optical transmission based on pre-dispersed spectral inversion (PSI) is investigated numerically. We find that PSI offers more significant performance improvement in dispersion-managed (DM) links than that in non-dispersion-managed (noDM) links. On the other hand, the DM link is more sensitive to the span offset from the center of the transmission link than noDM link. The performance difference between DM and noDM links is 1 dB if the span offset equals four spans in 20 × 90 km nonlinear transmission. Furthermore, we show that for the dispersion-managed transmission, in order to obtain the best system performance, the amount of pre-dispersion of the PSI, should be optimized over different dispersion maps.