Optical signal quality improvement due to nonlinear interaction between spectral channels

This paper examines stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) suppression in multichannel DWDM systems owing to nonlinear cross interaction between the channels and its effect on optical signal quality (1/OSNR_R) in a communication link. We present an experimental study of single-, three- and five-channel systems with 10 Gbit s^-1 NRZ channels. The optical signal quality in the three- and five-channel systems is shown to be better than that in the single-channel system. The reason for this is that cross-phase modulation broadens the spectrum of the signal and raises the SBS threshold. This in turn ensures a more pronounced optical signal quality improvement due to self-phase modulation.