Enhanced performance of WDM systems using directly modulated lasers on positive dispersion fibers

Cost-effective directly modulated distributed feedback lasers (DML) have attracted much attention recently for operation at the 1.55 μm wavelength band applications in metropolitan area networks. In this paper, we show by simulation that the effect of directly modulated laser chirp can be compensated by a negative dispersion fiber, but this only occurs in a specific range of DML output power, and that a pulse broadened by the positive dispersion fiber can be equalized using self-phase-modulation (SPM) in optical fiber. The majority of metro and access networks are made up of conventional single-mode fibers (SMF) which are positive dispersion fibers. We demonstrated that optimum compensation is always feasible for such fibers, since the magnitude of the SPM can be controlled by changing the optical power in the fiber. Furthermore, simulation suggests that this technique will enable directly modulated wavelength division multiplexed systems to enhance their performance if the power of each channel is appropriate.