JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO.

3, MARCH 2005

1137

New Techniques for the Suppression of the Four-Wave

Mixing-Induced Distortion in Nonzero Dispersion
Fiber WDM Systems
I. Neokosmidis, T. Kamalakis, A. Chipouras, and T. Sphicopoulos, Member, IEEE

AbstractThe performance of a wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical network can be severely degraded due
to fiber nonlinear effects. In the case where nonzero dispersion
(NZD) fibers are employed, the four-wave mixing (FWM) effect
sets an upper limit on the input power, especially in the case of
narrow channel spacing. In order to reduce FWM-induced distortion two new techniques, the hybrid amplitude-/frequency-shift
keying (ASK/FSK) modulation and the use of prechirped pulses
are investigated. It is shown that both techniques can greatly improve the -factor in a 10 Gb/s WDM system. This happens even
for very high input powers ( 10 dBm), where the degradation of
the conventional WDM system is prohibitively high. The proposed
methods are also applied and tested in higher bit rates (40 Gb/s).
It is deduced that although the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation
technique marginally improves the system performance, the
optical prechirp technique can still be used to greatly increase the
maximum allowable input power of the system.
Index TermsChirp, nonlinear optics, optical crosstalk, optical
fiber communications, wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM).

I. INTRODUCTION

AVELENGTH-DIVISION multiplexing (WDM) is

being widely adopted as a means to increase the capacity of optical networks. However, the rapid growth in the
number of Internet users and the need for provision of new
broadband services is expected to significantly increase the
traffic volume. There is thus a need to develop larger WDM
networks with narrower channel spacing and/or higher channel
data rate. Furthermore, a significant decrease in the overall cost
can be accomplished by reducing the number of optical amplifiers used in the links, enabling the use of higher input power
at the transmitter. However, an increase in the optical power
can cause signal degradation due to fiber nonlinear effects,
including four-wave mixing (FWM), cross-phase modulation
(XPM) and self-phase modulation (SPM).
Both XPM and FWM introduce intensity fluctuations that depend on the intensity of neighboring channels, resulting into interchannel interference. SPM is generally considered negligible
compared to XPM: even for a system of two optical channels,
XPM is twice as effective as SPM for the same intensity [1, p.
262]. However, in WDM systems employing nonzero dispersion

Manuscript received April 7, 2004; revised October 29, 2004. This work was
supported in part by the Hellenic Ministry of Education under a Pythagoras
Grant.
The authors are with the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens, Athens GR-15784, Greece (e-mail: i.neokosmidis@di.uoa.gr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2004.841448

(NZD) fibers, the main nonlinear induced penalty arises from

FWM. This is especially true in systems employing dispersion
compensation, in which the XPM-induced distortion is diminished [2], [3].
In recent years, several FWM suppression techniques have
been proposed. Since the power of the FWM products decreases
quickly as the fiber dispersion increases, one solution is to use
standard single-mode fibers. This, however, results in a large
dispersion accumulation at the receiver and necessitates the use
of long dispersion compensating fibers (DCFs) in each network
node. Another approach is to use optical multiplexers and demultiplexers with the combination of delay lines [4], bit-phase
arranged return-to-zero (BARZ) signals [5], hybrid WDM/timedivision multiplexing (TDM) technique [6], polarization-division multiplexing [7], and unequal channel spacing [8][10].
The above techniques come at the expense of less channel efficiency or/and more network complexity. For example, the use
of unequal channel spacing requires the design of optical multiplexers and demultiplexers with central wavelengths not compatible with the ITU grid.
In this paper, two new methods based on a hybrid amplitude-/frequency-shift keying (ASK/FSK) modulation and pulse
prechirping are proposed for the suppression of the FWM effect.
The basic ideas behind these methods are summarized as follows. FWM is a nonlinear process in which three waves of fre, ) interact due to the third-order
quencies , , and (
electric susceptibility to generate a product wave at frequency
. In a WDM system, a product is generated
for every possible combination of channels. Therefore, even if
the system has only ten channels, hundreds of FWM components are generated. If the channels are assumed to be in-phase
and equally spaced, then the efficiency of the FWM process is
high and most of the generated components will be located at
the channel frequencies. By FSK modulating the WDM channels, the spectral position of the FWM components is altered
and hence less products fall near the central frequency of the
WDM channels. Hence the accumulation of the FWM noise is
reduced. On the other hand the optical prechirping technique increases the phase mismatch, by randomizing the phases of the
input signals. Since the efficiency of the FWM process is inversely proportional to the phase mismatch, it follows that optical prechirping can suppress the FWM noise.
The effectiveness of the new methods is studied by numerically solving the basic nonlinear propagation equation with the
split step Fourier method (SSFM) [1]. Simulations show that
both techniques can provide a significant improvement on the

0733-8724/$20.00 2005 IEEE

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Fig. 1.

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 3, MARCH 2005

System structure.

-factor obtained at the receiver. A power gain as high as 3 dB

is obtained for 10 Gb/s WDM systems. The effectiveness of the
two techniques is also investigated for higher transmission rates.
It is shown that the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation can only marginally improve the performance of a 40 Gb/s WDM system.
Optical prechirping, on the other hand, offers a significant improvement even for these high bit rates.
This paper is organized as follows: The system configuration
is discussed in Section II. The transmission model used to study
the system under consideration is described in Section III. In
Section IV, the importance of the FWM-induced distortion in
a conventional WDM system is investigated. The basic concepts of the proposed compensation techniques are illustrated
in Section V. The results obtained by the application of the two
methods are presented and discussed in Section VI. Some concluding remarks are given in Section VII.
II. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
A conventional WDM link is shown in Fig. 1. The separate channels are ASK modulated and multiplexed into a single
WDM signal. The WDM signal is then launched into an NZD
fiber. As the signal propagates through the fiber, nonlinear effects can cause interchannel interference and degrade its quality.
At the receiver the signals are dispersion compensated and demultiplexed. Each signal is then detected using a direct detection receiver. The receiver may consist of a photodiode, an electrical amplifier, and an electrical filter. After the filter, the signal
is sampled and a decision threshold device is used to detect
whether a 1 or a 0 is received.
In this paper, the input optical power waveform representing
is specified within the time interval [0, 1
a single 1-bit
] as shown in (1) at the bottom of the page [11], where
denotes the peak input power,
represents the bit duration, and specifies the pulse shape. Note that
rises
within [0, ], remains constant and equal
from zero to
within
, and then falls from
to zero within
to
1
. Varying from one to zero, the pulse shape
changes from
-like to rectangular. To estimate the performance of the system, the input channels will be assumed
modulated by 2 1 pseudorandom bitstreams. Throughout this
work nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) pulses are used with a value of

. Finally, the bit duration

was taken to be 100 ps cor10 Gb/s and
25 ps
responding to an ASK bit rate
40 Gb/s. The central channel of the WDM system
for
is assumed to be located around
1.55 m.
The NZD transmission fiber is assumed to have a chromatic
2 ps/nm/km, an optical loss coeffidispersion coefficient
0.2 dB/km, and a nonlinear coefficient
2W
cient
km . The DCF used at the receiver has
200 ps/nm/km,
0.5 dB/km and
4.5 W km . The total length of
160 km. At its th output port, the WDM
the optical link is
demultiplexer is assumed to have a Gaussian transfer function
(2)
where
(3)
is the half-width 40 dB bandwidth
In the above equations,
of the demultiplexer and
is the central frequency of each
channel. The Gaussian transfer function is often encountered in
many practical demultiplexers (i.e., unflattened arrayed waveguide gratings [12]). In this paper, a point-to-point link with
a single multiplexer and demultiplexer is assumed and hence
unflattened devices are considered since their flattened counterparts tend to increase the power losses [12]. However, if the
optical signals go through many network nodes before reaching
the receiver, it is preferable to use flattened devices [12] in order
to increase the maximum number of multiplexers and demultiplexers that can be concatenated.
III. THE TRANSMISSION MODEL
In order to test the performance of the system, the fibers
propagation equation can be numerically solved using the
SSFM [1, pp. 5153]. The basic propagation equation is written
as
(4)
where
is the slowly varying complex envelope of
the optical field at time and position along the fiber, is the
is
group velocity dispersion (GVD) parameter,
the fiber loss coefficient, and is the nonlinear coefficient of the
fiber.
can
In an -channel WDM system, the input signal
be written as
(5)
where
and are the slowly varying envelope and the
central frequency of the th channel, respectively. Equation (4)
under the initial condition (5) can be used to describe the signal

and

(1)

NEOKOSMIDIS et al.: SUPPRESSION OF FWM-INDUCED DISTORTION

1139

Fig. 2. An eight-channel system with 50 GHz channel spacing and input peak
power P = 8 dBm is simulated numerically by varying the timing shifts
between the channels randomly.

propagation taking into account the optical losses, chromatic

dispersion, and three Kerr-induced nonlinear phenomena,
namely, the SPM, XPM, and FWM effects.
In order to investigate the performance of a WDM system, the
-factor can be calculated from the eye diagrams at the receiver.
The -factor is a commonly used parameter in telecommunications and is expressed as
(6)
where
and
are the average optical power of bits 1
and 0, respectively, and and are the corresponding standard deviations of the noise. In the cases examined, the -factor
pseudorandom bits,
was well calculated using
since for larger bitstreams the corresponding values changed
slightly ( 0.5 dB).
All channels are assumed aligned in time at the input (synchronous WDM system) and equally spaced. Under these conditions the strength of FWM effect is maximized, especially in
the case of RZ pulses [13], [14]. When NRZ pulses are used,
however, the synchronization of the bits does not seem to affect the system performance [14]. To test the impact of synchronization, numerical simulations were performed by varying the
relative time shifts of the channels randomly over [0, ] (one
bit period). An eight-channel system at 10 Gb/s with 8 dBm
peak power and 50 GHz channel spacing was assumed. The
-factor was calculated for the fifth channel (central channel)
and is plotted in Fig. 2. It is deduced that the -factor varies
with the random time shifts by as much as 1.25 dB with an average value of 7.1616 while the -factor for the aligned system
is 6.6475 and hence desychronization does not influence the performance of the system.
IV. IMPORTANCE OF THE FWM INDUCED DISTORTION
As the WDM channels become denser, power limitations imposed by nonlinear effects become more pronounced. FWM introduces intensity fluctuations in a WDM channel due to the
existence of the other channels. The power of these fluctuations increases with decreasing channel spacing and causes interchannel interference at the receiver.

Fig. 3. Comparison of the SPM, XPM, and FWM effect when P = 10 dBm.
(a) SPM effect, (b) SPM and XPM effects, and (c) SPM, XPM, and FWM
effects.

Before discussing the FWM compensation techniques, it will

be useful to compare the system degradation due to FWM with
that induced by XPM and SPM. In order to carry out this comparison, SPM- and XPM-induced distortion (without considering the FWM effect) is estimated by numerically solving the
set of coupled propagation (7)

(7)
and
is the envelope of
where
is the inverse of the group
the channel as above. Also
velocity at the frequency
and
is the GVD parameter at
the same frequency. Note that, in the above system of equaon the righttions, the SPM effect is described by the
hand side of (7) while the XPM effect is described by the sum
. The FWM is not taken into account in (7)
and hence, a comparison between the solutions of (4) and (7)
can be used to estimate the importance of the FWM-induced
distortion in the WDM link.
In order to ascertain that the FWM is indeed the dominant
noise source, the eye diagrams of the central channel are plotted
in Fig. 3 in the cases where (a) only SPM is assumed (i.e., only
the central WDM channel is on), (b) only SPM and XPM are
assumed, and (c) FWM, XPM, and SPM are assumed. An eight10 Gb/s is assumed with
channel WDM system with
a channel spacing of 50 GHz. Observing the eye diagrams of
Fig. 3, it is deduced that the degradation induced by SPM and
XPM is indeed much lower than that of FWM in a WDM link
with NZDF.
The results of Fig. 3 can also be justified theoretically. In [13],
it is shown that the XPM intensity fluctuations depend on the
accumulated dispersion of the span. When dispersion compensation is used, the XPM-induced intensity distortion is greatly
diminished. On the other hand, the FWM-induced intensity distortion rests almost unaffected from dispersion compensation.

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 3, MARCH 2005

GHz), the allowable central frequency deviation is still under

discussion. Note that, in an unequally spaced system, should
7.5 GHz where
be smaller than
is the frequency slot and the bit rate, according to G.692 (Appendix V-5). It must be underlined that 200 GHz is the channel
40 Gb/s while 50 and 100
spacing used in the case of
10 Gb/s.
GHz is the channel spacing used in the case of
In order to model the effect of finite rise and fall time of the
FSK scheme, one could alternatively use the frequency modula, where the pulse variation
tion
is given by

sign

Fig. 4. The FSK modulation scheme used in the proposed system.

Also as shown in [13], the FWM-induced intensity distortion

and as 1
, while the XPM distortion
decreases as 1
decreases much more slowly. It is therefore not surprising that
in the dense WDM system considered, the FWM-induced intensity distortion dominates over the XPM effect.
V. DESCRIPTION OF THE FWM COMPENSATION SCHEMES
A. Hybrid FSK/ASK Modulation Technique
In order to explain the effectiveness of the hybrid ASK/FSK
technique, we first consider three continuous waves at frequencies , , and . The FWM products will be located at fre, where , , and take the values
quencies
1, 2, or 3. As mentioned in the Introduction, if the channels are
equally spaced, the central frequency of the products will coincide with some of the central frequencies of the channels. In
order to reduce the number of FWM products that coincide with
the WDM channels, one solution is to modulate the WDM signals using a special kind of FSK modulation. In the context of
this special scheme, the WDM channels are divided into pairs
and on each pair the channels follow the same FSK modulation.
The FSK modulation of two adjacent pairs is opposite, i.e., if
away from their central
the channels in a pair are detuned
frequency, the channels of the adjacent pair are oppositely deand so on, as shown in Fig. 4. Note that a similar (but
tuned
constant) channel detuning scheme is also used in the unequal
channel spacing technique [10]. The hybrid ASK/FSK system
structure is depicted in Fig. 5(a). Fig. 5(b), shows the optical
10 Gb/s
spectrum of a hybrid ASK/FSK signal with
and a 1 Gb/s FSK rate. The peak optical power of the ASK
10 dBm and is taken 5 GHz. The modulasignal is
tion of the FSK signal is such that the frequency deviation on a
channel changes sign consecutively. From Fig. 5(b), one can notice the two peaks caused by the FSK modulation. Note that the
5 GHz detuning is compatible with the ITU-T recommendations for channel spacing larger than 200 GHz. ITU Recommendation G.692 defines that for a system with channel spacing
200 GHz, the allowable central frequency deviation must
5. For narrower channel spacing (i.e. 50 or 100
be equal to

(8)

where is the channel number,

is the corresponding central
is the central frequency without FSK modulafrequency,
is the FSK bit rate, while 2 is the interval in
tion, and
remains constant. In Fig. 5(c), the pulse variation
which
is depicted for
740 ps along with a square FSK pulse
, for
1 GHz.
B. Optical Prechirp
In this section, optical prechirping is proposed as another solution for the reduction of the effect of the FWM induced distortion. Since the efficiency of the FWM products is inversely
proportional to the phase mismatch, it follows that reducing
the phase coherence may reduce the power of the FWM noise.
One way to reduce this coherence is through pulse prechirping.
Note that a similar technique is used in the suppression of the
XPM-induced distortion in systems employing standard fibers
[15], [16]. In the case of NZD fibers, where the FWM effect
dominates as discussed in Section IV, optical prechirping will
be shown to greatly improve the -factor by suppressing the
FWM effect.
There are several methods to produce a prechirped signal
such as cascading intensity and phase modulators or using dispersion-compensating devices like chirped fiber gratings and
DCFs. In this paper, the latter technique is chosen due to its
ease of implementation. The system configuration is shown in
Fig. 6(a). Note that a DCF is also used at the receiver in order to
compensate the remaining accumulated dispersion of the signal.
designates the power at the end of the
In this configuration,
transmitter DCF.
In the case where the transmitter DCF is too long, the propagation of the pulses inside the DCF degrades their shape. This
may oppose the improvement in system performance due to
the phase mismatch induced by the optical prechirp. For this
of the DCF used at the transmitter
reason, the length
must be carefully chosen. To estimate the optimal length, numerical simulations are used by measuring the -factor of the
central channel for various DCF lengths. In Fig. 6(b), a comparison between the pulses at the input and output of the DCF
225 m (optimized by numerical simulais given for
200 ps/nm/km. It is shown that the pulses are
tions) and
slightly broadened and the output power is not reduced significantly. This is expected, since the optimized length of the DCF
for the various systems is typically small as discussed below.

NEOKOSMIDIS et al.: SUPPRESSION OF FWM-INDUCED DISTORTION

1141

= 10 dBm. The
( ) 2 = 740 ps (solid line)

Fig. 5. (a) The hybrid ASK/FSK WDM system configuration. (b) The power spectral density of a hybrid ASK/FSK modulated signal for P
GHz. (c) Pulse variation p t for t
ASK and FSK modulation rates are 10 and 1 Gb/s, respectively, and the channel detuning is
along with a square FSK pulse ( t
=R
, dashed line) for R
GHz.

2 =1

=1

1=5

the pulse from the central frequency. Hence, to quantify the rate
and consequently the amount of prechirp inof change of
duced at the transmitter, one can simply use the time derivative
[1] of
.
VI. EFFECTIVENESS OF THE PROPOSED METHODS

Fig. 6. (a) System configuration of the prechirped optical WDM system and
(b) optical pulses at the input and the output of the DCF at the transmitter.

Some pulse distortion due to the propagation phenomena inside

the DCF is observed.
It is well known that the propagation through a DCF with
high chromatic dispersion coefficient causes phase modulation
of the optical pulses and converts them to chirped pulses [1]. The
implies that the instantatime dependence of the phase
differs across
neous frequency

In order to investigate the performance improvement of the

two techniques, a series of simulations were performed using
of the
the SSFM method. The 40 dB half-width bandwidth
optical demultiplexer was optimized at the receiver in order to
achieve the highest -factor value for the different values of
. As expected, the optimum
is roughly
the input power
equal to the channel spacing. For example, in the case of a
is 90, 95, and
10 Gb/s with 100 GHz spacing, the optimum
75 GHz for the uncompensated, the hybrid ASK/FSK, and the
prechirped systems, respectively. The optimum values of
are approximately independent from the input power
and
were calculated by estimating the -factors for various values
.
of
Fig. 7 shows eye diagrams for the fifth channel (central
channel) of a single span eight-channel WDM system in the
cases when (a) none of the two methods is applied (uncompensated system), (b) the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation is applied,
and (c) prechirped pulses are used. A 10 Gb/s WDM system is
assumed, with channel spacing equal to 50 GHz. The channel
5 GHz and
detuning of the hybrid ASK/FSK system is
1 Gb/s. The values of
the FSK modulation rate is
and
were optimized through numerical simulation
by calculating and maximizing the -factor of the central
channel. A 225 m DCF fiber was used for optical prechirping,
with parameters as given in Section II. This figure provides
a first indication of the performance improvement of the

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 3, MARCH 2005

Fig. 7. Eye diagrams for the central channel of a single span eight-channel
WDM system: (a) conventional WDM system, (b) application of the hybrid
ASK/FSK modulation, and (c) WDM with prechirped pulses. The transmission
rate is 10 Gb/s, the channel spacing is 50 GHz, and the input power is 10 dBm.

two techniques. As shown in the figure, the eye diagram of

the uncompensated system is closed due to the effect of the
FWM-induced distortion. The -factor in this case is 3.4,
resulting in a high error probability. If the FWM is assumed
to follow Gaussian distribution, this -factor corresponds to
an error probability of
. However,
using the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique, the quality
of the link is significantly improved, as shown by the second
eye diagram. The -factor in this case is 7.5, implying an error
probability on the order 10 . The results are even better for
the case of optical prechirping, in which case the -factor is
10.8 and the corresponding error probability is even lower.
Hence, the effectiveness of the proposed methods on reducing
the FWM noise is clearly seen, even for input powers as high
as 10 dBm where the degradation of the conventional WDM
system is prohibitively high.
To further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods
and gain a more quantitative perspective of the performance of
each compensation scheme, the -factor was evaluated for various values of the input power. Fig. 8 depicts the -factor of
assuming
the central channel (worst case) as a function of
10 Gb/s and (a)
8 channels and a channel spacing
50 GHz; (b)
8,
GHz; (c)
,
50 GHz; and (d)
16,
100 GHz. The
FSK modulation rate for the hybrid ASK/FSK is 1 Gb/s, and a
5 GHz frequency detuning is used. The DCF fiber used in
the above cases is 225, 150, 48.5, and 19.4 m for Fig. 8(a)(d),
respectively. The values of at the center of the pulse are calcuGHz ,
GHz ,
lated numerically and
GHz , and
GHz , respectively, for the
above cases. As shown by the figures, both techniques greatly
improve the -factor in all cases. For example, in the case of an
16 WDM channel system with 100 GHz channel spacing

Fig. 8. Q-factor of the central channel as a function of the input power P for
a 10 Gb/s system of (a) eight channels and 50 GHz channel spacing, (b) eight
channels and 100 GHz channel spacing, (c) 16 channels and 50 GHz channel
spacing, and (d) 16 channels and 100 GHz channel spacing.

[Fig. 8(d)], the obtained -factor for

14 dBm was approximately 5.3 for the uncompensated system and 8.8 for the

NEOKOSMIDIS et al.: SUPPRESSION OF FWM-INDUCED DISTORTION

Fig. 9.
system.

Q-factor versus input power for a single span eight-channel 40 Gb/s

hybrid ASK/FSK modulation at the transmitter. These values

correspond to a -factor improvement of 2.2 dB. It can also be
10 is achieved for
12.3 dBm for
seen that while
the conventional system, the same Q-factor value is achieved
13.8 dBm in the case of the hybrid ASK/FSK modufor
lation technique. This corresponds to a power gain of 1.5 dB.
The results obtained from the optical prechirping technique
15.1 for
14 dBm. It
are even better. In this case,
is understood that the improvement of the -factor is 4.55 dB.
In order to obtain -factor equal to ten, the input power can be
as high as 15 dBm. This translates to a power gain greater than
2.5 dB. Note that this power gain of 2.5 dB can be used to increase the tolerance of the system or increase the span length by
12.5 km. Similar results can also be observed for the
other cases considered in the figure. It is therefore evident that
both techniques offer a significant improvement in the performance of the system.
In all cases the -factor is reduced as the input power
increases. This is not surprising, since it is well known that
.
the power of the produced components is proportional to
Hence, these results demonstrate again the strong dependence
of the FWM noise, and consequently of the -factor, on the
input power. However, the improvement of the proposed techniques is significant even for high input powers.
In Fig. 9, the performance improvement of the two techniques
in the case of an eight-channel 40 Gb/s WDM system is investigated. The channels are assumed to have 200 GHz spacing
while the rest of the parameters are the same as those of the
10 Gb/s system considered earlier. The FSK modulation rate for
GHz frequency dethe hybrid ASK/FSK is 1 Gb/s, and a
tuning is used. The DCF fiber used in the above case is 193.9 m.
The hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique only marginally
improves the system performance. On the other hand, the use
of optical prechirped pulses significantly improves the value of
14 dBm, the -factors of the conventhe -factor. For
tional and the prechirped system is approximately equal to 8.0
and 16.0, implying a 3 dB improvement. Also, a power gain as
12.
high as 2.5 dB is obtained for
It seems therefore that prechirping the optical channels can
be used in order to reduce the FWM-induced distortion for a
40 Gb/s WDM system as well. Although 40 Gb/s WDM systems are presently not used in commercial networks, they may

1143

constitute an option for future all-optical backbone networks. It

should also be noticed that the optical prechirping can be implemented with greater ease than the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation
technique. A single DCF at the receiver can be used to simultaneously prechirp all the WDM signals. On the other hand, the
hybrid ASK/FSK technique may prove more amenable for integration with the WDM multiplexer on a single chip.
In addition, both methods seem to present significant advantages compared to other suppression techniques since they
overcome some problems. For example, the use of unequal
channel spacing [8][10] comes at the expense of increased
multiplexer/demultiplexer design complexity. In [10], the BER
is improved by one order of magnitude while, as shown in
this section, the proposed techniques achieve many orders of
magnitude improvement. Unlike the hybrid WDM/TDM technique [6], these methods do not require the allocation of time
slots and the generation of RZ pulses. The optical delay line
technique [4] is applicable only when zero dispersion fibers are
used. It is also interesting to note that the methods proposed in
this paper employ NRZ modulation, which is more easily implemented than RZ modulation. It is also worth mentioning that
the improvement induced by the hybrid ASK/FSK technique
does not depend significantly on the shape of the FSK pulses.
For example, in the case of the eight-channel WDM system of
Fig. 7(b), the -factor improvement was 2.5 dB for the square
pulsed FSK scheme and 1.5 dB for the FSK scheme with pulse
740 ps. The input power was
shapes given by (8) with
assumed to be
8 dBm. It is therefore deduced that even
if the FSK pulses have large rise and fall times ( 130 ps), the
FSK scheme can still improve the -factor.
VII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, two techniqueshybrid ASK/FSK modulation
and prechirping the optical pulsesare proposed to suppress the
FWM-induced distortion which can pose important limitations
on the input power of a WDM system. The effectiveness of the
two methods is numerically demonstrated using the split step
Fourier method to simulate the WDM signal propagation. From
the obtained results, it is shown that both techniques greatly improve the performance of the system, providing a power gain
that can be as high as 2.5 dB in the case of a 10 Gb/s WDM
system. Prechirping the optical pulses can also be used for the
reduction of the FWM-induced distortion for a higher bit rate
(40 Gb/s) system as well and seems to be more easily implemented than the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique.
REFERENCES
[1] G. P. Agrawal, Nonlinear Fiber Optics, 2nd ed. New York: Academic,
1995.
[2] A. V. T. Cartaxo, Cross-phase modulation in intensity modulation-direct detection WDM systems with multiple optical amplifiers and dispersion compensators, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 178190,
Feb. 1999.
[3] R. Hui, K. R. Demarest, and C. T. Allen, Cross-phase modulation in
multispan WDM optical fiber systems, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 17, no.
6, pp. 10181026, Jun. 1999.
[4] K. Inoue, Suppression technique for fiber four-wave mixing using optical multi-/demultiplexers and a delay line, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 11,
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I. Neokosmidis, photograph and biography not available at the time of publication.

T. Kamalakis, photograph and biography not available at the time of publication.

A. Chipouras, photograph and biography not available at the time of publication.

T. Sphicopoulos (M87), photograph and biography not available at the time of

publication.