The proposed research is to investigate the transmission impairments of optical fibers at high data rates due to the optical nonlinearity and the polarization dispersion in the fiber. The goal of the research is to use combined experimental and theoretical techniques to find the best system configuration (i.e. dispersion map, optical amplifier spacing, data format, etc.) to minimize the transmission impairment in high data-rate (20 to 40 Gb/s) WDM systems.
