A 1580-nm band WDM transmission technology employing optical duobinary coding

This paper reports 1580-nm band wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) transmission employing optical duobinary coding over dispersion-shifted fibers. By using the 1580 nm band, the generation of four-wave mixing (FWM) over dispersion-shifted fibers (DSF's) can be suppressed. Optical duobinary coding is dispersion-tolerant because of its narrow bandwidth, and enables the use of the conventional binary intensity modulated direct detection (IM-DD) receiver. First, comparisons are made for WDM transmission performance in the 1580-nm band between conventional binary nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) coding with and without postdispersion compensation, and optical duobinary coding by computer simulation is described. From the numerical simulations, it is found that the optical duobinary coding has superior transmission performance to the conventional binary coding without any dispersion compensation, and that the difference in the transmission performance between two coding methods is very small even if postdispersion compensation at the optical receiver is applied to the NRZ coding method. Second, transmission performance between the conventional binary NRZ and the optical duobinary signals without any dispersion compensation is compared with the straight-line experiment over 500-km dispersion-shifted fiber. The experimental results reveal that the transmission distance with optical duobinary coding is doubled in comparison with that of the conventional binary NRZ signals. Finally, 16-channel, 10-Gb/s optical duobinary WDM signals in the 1580-nm band are successfully transmitted over 640 km (80 km x 8) of DSF without any dispersion compensation or management.