Innovative optical components and their impact on future optical transmission systems

Optical transmission systems made impressive progress in the field of system capacity, reach and flexibility. Beside all improvements achieved so far, signal distortion on the one hand side and noise accumulation on the other hand side are the limitations of optical transmission system performance. In terms of signal distortion besides advanced link design strategies optical regenerators are of high interest for signal conditioning along a fiber link. Our paper reviews signal regeneration techniques focusing on fiber nonlinearity based setups both in interferometric and non interferometric architecture. We analyze the impact of regenerator design parameters as fiber nonlinear parameters, regenerator input power and characteristics of filters on signal improvement and demonstrate e.g. the increase of system reach. In order to address the upcoming techniques of advanced modulation formats we introduce a fiber based regenerator scheme that shows attractive potential especially for phase modulated signals. Combining these new optical formats with regenerative methods is attractive for high performance systems. For the differential phase shift keying (DPSK) modulation format we investigate the potential of a cross phase modulation based type of regenerator in more detail. The availability of suitable regenerator components, especially highly nonlinear fibers is one of the challenges. Especially the new fiber types known as photonic crystal fibers can act as bases for new structures and thus will open the door for ultra high performance optical transmission systems.