Abstract
The influence of laser chirping, fiber chromatic dispersion, and receiver filtering on the shape of the pulses in 11 Gb/s lightwave transmission systems is discussed. Both the NRZ and RZ encoding formats are considered as well as positive and negative dispersion. The results quantify the sensitivity of the system performance to the receiver decision time, the maximum permissible deviation of the laser wavelength from the fiber zero dispersion wavelength, and the improvement in transmission performance offered by pulse compression arising from negative dispersion.