Demonstration of Negative Dispersion Fibers for DWDM Metropolitan Area Networks

In this paper, we present a detailed experimental and theoretical study, showing that a novel nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber with negative dispersion enhances the capabilities of metropolitan area optical systems, while at the same time, reducing the system cost by eliminating the need of dispersion compensation. The performance of this dispersion-optimized fiber was studied using different types of optical transmitters for both 1310- and 1550-nm wavelength windows and for both 2.5- and 10-Gb/s bit rates. It is shown that this new fiber extends the nonregenerated distance up to 300 km when directly modulated distributed feedback (DFB) laser transmitters at 2.5 Gb/s are used. The negative dispersion characteristics of the fiber also enhance the transmission performance in metropolitan area networks with transmitters that use electroabsorption (EA) modulator integrated distributed feedback (DFB) lasers, which are biased for positive chirp. In the case of 10 Gb/s, externally modulated signals (using either EA-DFBs or external modulated lasers using Mach–Zehnder modulators), we predict that the maximum reach that can be accomplished without dispersion compensation is more than 200 km for both 100- and 200-GHz channel spacing. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the capabilities of a nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber with negative dispersion for metropolitan applications.