Mitigation of Chromatic Dispersion using Different Compensation Methods in Optical Fiber Communication: A Review

Fiber-optic communication systems are light wave systems that employ optical fibers for information transmission to increase several orders of magnitude the bit rate distance product. However the performance of optical fiber communication system is limited by fiber dispersion. Dispersion compensation is the most important and challenging aspect of the optical fiber communication to maintain a high optical signal to noise ratio for good quality of the signal. Different techniques available in the literature to compensate dispersion are dispersion compensating fiber, optical filters, fiber Bragg grating, and electronic dispersion compensation. Among all these techniques of dispersion compensation electronic dispersion compensation is preferred because electronic equalizer cost can be almost negligible. The processing of optical field in the electronic domain has the potential to efficiently increase the dispersion tolerance. A review of the work done by researchers to compensate the dispersion has been presented in this paper. Department of ECE, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, INDIA Keywords—Dispersion Compensating Fiber (DCF), Directly Modulated Laser (DML), Electronic Dispersion Compensation (EDC), Group Velocity Dispersion (GVD)