Performance evaluation for 160-Gb/s optical phase conjugation systems considering dispersion mapping and third-order dispersion

The impact of third-order dispersion (TOD) is investigated by numerical simulations in 160-Gb/s single-channel systems incorporated with dispersion mapping and optical phase conjugation (OPC). System performances using retrun-to-zero (RZ) or carrier-suppressed RZ (CSRZ) modulation format are evaluated on the optimized dispersion map. The results indicate that even though TOD has been fully compensated, the intra-channel nonlinearity induced by local TOD would degrade the system performance in nonlinear regime. The scheme with an optimized dispersion map provides a much higher performance and offers a larger tolerance on a variation of pre-compensation. CSRZ modulation format is more robust due to its tradeoff between tolerances on intrarchannel nonlinearity and dispersion.