Comparative analysis of the dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) scheme in long-haul dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM)

Dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technique in optical communication was used to improve the system performance combined several channels in a transmission line especially for long-haul optical link, but the presence of dispersion limited the system performance. The Dispersion, one of the distortion in optical communication system, influenced the performance of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) by limiting the bandwidth capacity, so the DWDM system required a tool to compress the effect of dispersion. This works aimed to analyse performance of the DWDM systems using the bit error rate (BER) and Q-factor parameter that implemented the symmetrical DCF to compress the dispersion effect. Observation were made on a model of 16-channel DWDM with bitrate 40 Gbps, over 1050 km optical link with channel spacing 100 GHz. The DWDM system was design using two DCF configurations and Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) to regenerate the optical signal. The system performance was observed with optical power launch variations of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 dBm and variations in the DCF scheme (type-A and type-B). Based on results, Type-A performance is slightly better in terms of Q-factor than the B-type scheme. Based on BER value, both type-A and type-B performance have equivalence value. In conclusion, the different scheme for DCF placement to compensate the dispersion effect in DWDM shows the equal performance.