TRANSMITTING BINARY DIGITS USING MULTIPLE SOLITONS

摘要

An optical communications system comprises a laser (10) controlled to output a stream of soliton pulses (12) coupled to a beamsplitter arrangement (14, 20, 22) which converts the pulse stream (12) to a stream of pulses (24) having twice the pulse rate. This stream of pulses (24) is modulated to form a binary coded signal by modulator (24) as a series of binary digits each having one of two values in which a series of n optical soliton pulses, where n is an integer>1 is coupled into an optical fibre (4) at each occurrence of one of the two values. The optical fibre (4) and repeaters (6) provide a transmission link to a receiver (8). The present invention allows one to increase the average power within a bit without having to operate with shorter pulses that would otherwise be necessary with one soliton pulse per bit of prior art systems in order to avoid the limits inherent in single soliton pulse per bit prior art systems. The result is that the ASE noise limit is moved to longer pulses so allowing higher bit rates notwithstanding that there is a greater number of solitons in each bit of data than with single soliton per bit scheme of modulation. The method also reduces GH the jitter and thus opens the window of operation by pushing the G-H limit to longer pulses