Numerical Study of Random Variation of Span Lengths and Span Path-Average Dispersions on Dispersion-Managed Soliton System Performance

We have studied the performance of dispersion-managed (DM) soliton systems with random variation of span lengths and span path average dispersions by numerical simulation. We show that while DM-solitons still exist in systems with non-periodic dispersion maps, those non-periodic maps tend to degrade system performance. We investigate the performance degradation of both on-off keyed (OOK) and differential-phase-shift keyed (DPSK) DM-soliton systems with random span lengths and random span path-average dispersions. For both cases, we find that the reduction in Q factor is less in dense WDM than in single- channel transmission.