High-speed optical transmissions over a second- and third-order dispersion-managed DSF span with parametric tunable dispersion compensator

A wideband and fast tunable chromatic dispersion compensator is one of the key components for the future high-speed optical transmissions. We have so far proposed and demonstrated a new tunable dispersion compensation scheme called parametric tunable dispersion compensator (P-TDC), which is based on the combination of parametric frequency conversion and frequency dependent dispersive media. The P-TDC has many attractive features such as a seamlessly wideband operation, wide tunable range and fast dispersion tuning. In fact, with appropriate configurations of dispersive media, the P-TDC can compensate the dispersion slope of transmission fibers even though the second-order dispersion is small. In this paper, we use such a P-TDC scheme and successfully achieve high-speed optical transmissions over a second- and third-order dispersion managed dispersion shifted fiber (DSF) span. The transmission experiments show low-penalty 172 Gbit/s return-to-zero on-off-keying transmissions over 126-km DSF.