Transmission performance of high bit rate spectrum-sliced WDM systems

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Abstract
We simulate transmission of a spectrum-sliced WDM channel operating at high bit rates (e.g., 622 to 2488 Mb/s). We calculate the bit error rate using the non-Gaussian statistics of thermal light sources that are commonly used in spectrum slicing and account for the effects of fiber dispersion. We evaluate the tradeoff in optical slice linewidth between signal-to-excess optical noise ratio and dispersion penalty in spectrum-sliced WDM systems, and determine the channel slicewidth that minimizes transmission penalty for a given link length and bit rate. We compare our simulations against the measured performance of a 1244 Mb/s channel over 20 km of fiber. The results in this paper provide useful information for the design of spectrum-sliced WDM networks.