Nonlinear chirped grating based tunable dispersion compensation using strain

Chirped fiber Bragg gratings (CFBGs) offer an attractive solution for dispersion management in long haul and high capacity point to point optical links. The deployment of reconfigurable optical networks however demands dynamic dispersion compensation schemes to address channel degrading effects. Dynamic correction of dispersion can be achieved by tuning the optical characteristics of the non-linearly chirped FBG using external controls like temperature, strain, magnetic, acousto-optic and electro-optic techniques. In this work, simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of nonlinear chirped gratings as tunable dispersion compensators. The induced dispersion of the grating is found to be tunable from −800 ps/nm to −2657 ps/nm using strain as external perturbation. BER of 1.85 × 10−118 and 1.71 × 10−116 is achieved after the transmission of the information through 90 and 140 km section of single mode optical fiber respectively. This is achieved by adjusting or tuning the dispersion offered by the nonlinear chirped FBG dynamically in the required range.