Microwave tunable dispersion compensator for optical fiber systems

A tunable device based on chirped microstrip delay lines is proposed to precompensate at the transmitter; the chromatic dispersion accumulated during optical fiber propagation. Compensated dispersion is finely tuned by changing the effective dielectric constant of the microstrip line by means of moving dielectric perturbers. Compensation up to 51 ps/GHz necessary to propagate over 400 km uncompensated standard single-mode fiber at 10 Gb/s is demonstrated. The proposed solution does not require coherent detection and can find application in metropolitan and regional area networks, where the physical path traced by each channel can change owing to the traffic routing, requiring the dynamic compensation of different amounts of accumulated dispersion.