Jitter in fibre- based soliton transmission systems

High bit rate long-haul transmission systems on optical fibres are mainly limited by the Kerr effect. Solitons, that balance exactly the Kerr effect by the chromatic dispersion are thus the optimal pulses for fibre transmission. However, the chromatic dispersion associated to the amplifier noise is responsible for a large jitter at receiver end. A calculation of the jitter variance and statistics is presented in this paper. Soliton control techniques can reduce efficiently the jitter variance but they are shown to strongly affect the statistics. It is finally demonstrated that the whole jitter statistics is needed to correctly characterize the soliton transmission system performance.