Scaling guidelines of a soliton-based power limiter for 2R-optical regeneration applications

Abstract

-In this work, we report scaling rules for the design of an all-fibered soliton-based power limiter for reamplification and reshaping (2R) regeneration process. In particular, we propose general guidelines to fix the optimum fiber length and initial power of the regenerator. We quantitatively point out the optical power limiting effect of the device enabling a significant reduction of the amplitude jitter of a degraded signal. Influence of the initial level of amplitude jitter is discussed and the results are compared with a self-phase modulation-based configuration working in the normal dispersion regime. Realistic numerical simulations in the context of 160 Gbit/s signals confirm that an efficient improvement of the signal quality can be achieved by means of such a device.

A fiber-based limiter at 170 Gbit/s for all-optical regeneration

“…Let us stress that the working point of the device P in is found to be 28 mW (14.5 dBm), which is significantly lower than the average power required for 2R regeneration based on Mamyshev configuration for similar bit rates [5]. The energy yield of device is 20% and is below the value of 40% as theoretically calculated in [12]. This difference can be explained by the splice loss of the fiber and the insertion loss of the filter.…”

“…3(b) which points out that regimes A and B are the best suited for optical limiting. The optimum normalized length ξ L = L/L D of the regenerator has been found to be ξ L = 1.55 where L D is the dispersion length of the fiber [1,12]. The optimum input power P in is derived from the optimum soliton order N = (γP in L D ) 1/2 , which has been found to be N = 1.45.…”

“…The limiter uses a 920 m-long highly nonlinear optical fiber (HNLF) with an attenuation coefficient α = 0.6 dB/km, a second-order dispersion D = 0.7 ps/nm/km and a nonlinear coefficient γ of 11 W -1 km -1 . The choice of the fiber parameters is determined by simulation according to [12]. The advantage of using a nonlinear fiber is to reduce the required optical power.…”

“…An A question that naturally arises is the choice of the optimum set of parameters of the limiter (especially, the fiber length L and the injected power P in ). Following the normalization procedure detailed in [5], general design guidelines have been very recently proposed [12]. One crucial element to characterize the device is its power transfer function that links the output power to the input power.…”

“…Concerning the limitation function for high level pulses, various optical methods taking advantage of the instantaneous Kerr nonlinear response of optical fibers have been proposed [9][10][11]. Among them, the spectrally filtered fiber-based limiter is very attractive because of it simplicity, high efficiency, low power consumption and its suitability to very high bit rates [11][12][13].…”