Analysis of soliton collisions in a wavelength-division- multiplexed dispersion-managed soliton transmission system

Timing jitter induced by soliton collisions is the leading nonlinear penalty in wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) dispersion-managed soliton transmission. Through analysis and numerical simulations we show that consecutive complete collisions together with partial collisions at the system output cause approximately the same amount of timing shift as partial collisions at the system input. We further show that the worst-case timing shift diverges logarithmically with the total number of WDM channels and linearly with the total transmission distance. However, the probability for such worst cases to occur decreases exponentially with channel spacing, total number of WDM channels, and transmission distance. We conclude that only the effects caused by adjacent channels need to be considered in a high channel count WDM system.