Simultaneous Cancellation of Fiber Loss, Dispersion, and Kerr Effect in Ultralong-Haul Optical Fiber Transmission by Midway Optical Phase Conjugation Incorporated With Distributed Raman Amplification

An alternative application of distributed Raman amplification (DRA) for ultralong-haul optical fiber transmission is proposed. In our study, the DRA is employed in a transmission system using midway optical phase conjugation (OPC) for amplifying an optical signal and, at the same time, for constructing signal power evolution, which is symmetrical with respect to the midpoint of the system where the OPC is performed. Then, the nonlinear signal waveform distortions that are caused by the Kerr effect, as well as fiber dispersion, are almost completely compensated by the OPC, whereas the fiber loss is compensated by the DRA. Three possible symmetrical signal power maps - a power map that has a reverse sign of the power map that is caused by lump amplification, a flat signal power map, and an arbitrary symmetrical signal power map - are numerically designed by using appropriate Raman pump powers. We show that the flat power map exhibits smaller difference from the target and a higher optical signal-to-noise ratio and requires lower pump power than the other two power maps. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that, by employing the flat power maps with a span of 40 km, a single-wavelength signal whose data rate is 160 Gb/s can be successfully transmitted over 5000 km, and the Kerr effect is sufficiently suppressed near limitation due to the nonlinear accumulation of noise. Finally, we study the feasibility of expanding our method to wavelength-division-multiplexed signal transmission by designing a DRA gain with multiple-wavelength pumping to simultaneously obtain a flat power map and a wide-and-flat gain bandwidth. By using four-wavelength Raman pumps while carefully choosing pump wavelengths and their powers, we achieve the DRA gain that simultaneously gives a fluctuation of the signal power of only 3.5%, a gain ripple of only 5.3%, and, at the same time, a gain bandwidth of as wide as 46 nm.