A Performance Analysis of Proposed Hybrid Dispersion Compensation Techniques for WDM Optical Systems

Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) is the most widely used technique for communication purpose. It provides better transmission quality, higher bandwidth and data rate. Although OFC has several advantages, but still the performance of the optical system has been observed to degrade because of various transmission impairments. But specifically, the most dominant impairment is dispersion. Dispersion, i.e. pulse broadening further leads to Intersymbol Interference (ISI) in the signal. In literature, various dispersion compensation techniques such as Dispersion Compensation Fiber (DCF), Electronic Dispersion Compensation (EDC), Optical Phase Conjugation (OPC), compensation using digital filters and Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBG) are discussed. DCF and FBG are the commonly used techniques because of their respective advantages. On combining the Single Mode Fiber (SMF) and DCF, there are four possible schemes for compensation. These schemes are compared in accordance with their simulation results and it is concluded that the Post + Pre hybrid module has the maximum Q-factor of 29.8 for an optimum threshold of 0.48 periods and the minimum BER is 1e-194.9. A hybrid of DCF and FBG is also proposed.

Keywords: ISI, DCF, SMF, FBG, SPM, dispersion compensation.