Optical spectral shaping for nonlinearity enhancement in high speed digital coherent optical transmissions

1. A method for using optical spectral shaping to improve optical power distribution in spectra for enhanced fiber nonlinearity tolerance in an optical transmission system, said method comprising:

evaluating an optical signal spectrum to estimate filtering parameters of an optical spectral filtering device for shaping optical signal spectrum for improved distribution of optical power among signal spectral components, said filtering parameters including filtering notch center and depth and dispersion;

determining a feedback for fine tuning said optical spectral filtering device for nonlinearity tolerance enhancement in said optical transmission system, responsive to received optical signal quality in the optical signal spectrum;

using said feedback to adjust said optical spectral filtering device for predetermined optical spectral shaping and predetermined fiber nonlinearity tolerance in said optical transmission system, said predetermined optical spectral shaping being performed by aligning an Fabry-Perot (FP) filter notch with a center of an optical signal spectrum;

configuring a fixed optical filtering device to match output filtering curves of said optical spectral filtering device adjusted by said feedback; and

reducing nonlinear penalty by modifying the spectral shape of a WDM channel generated by optical transmitters by enhancing the power of high frequency spectral components using a filter having a transmittance profile designed to adjust the ratio of low and high frequency spectral components in the spectrum of the WDM channel.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein said filtering parameters further comprises periodicity.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein said optical spectral filtering device includes periodic filtering characteristics for multiple channels simultaneously.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein said optical signal spectrum comprises multiple high-speed generated optical signal in two orthogonal polarizations at different wavelengths.

5. The method of claim 4 , further comprising combining multiple input channels that are directed through a single optical transmission media.

6. The method of claim 5 , wherein said optical transmission media imposes nonlinear effects on said generated optical signal.

7. The method of claim 6 , wherein the received signal is digitized for signal recovery in response to coherent reception of the generated optical signal.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the filtering parameters include periodicity, wherein the spectral filtering device includes a multi-channel Fabry-Perot (FP) filter for optical spectral shaping (OSS) by aligning a FP filter notch with a center of an optical signal spectrum.

9. The method of claim 8 , comprising a wave shaper to emulated different FPs.

10. The method of claim 1 , comprising filters with different notch depths at 50 GHz and 100 GHz FSRs.

11. The method of claim 1 , comprising using an optical spectral shaping to suppress low-frequency components of a WDM optical transmission channel to enhance fiber nonlinearity tolerance without reducing the optical signal power in an optical transmission system.

12. The method of claim 1 , comprising using an optical spectral shaping to suppress low-frequency components of a so called WDM optical transmission channel in order to enhance fiber nonlinearity tolerance without reducing the optical signal power in an optical transmission system.

13. The method of claim 1 , wherein the optical shaping is achieved by using a passive device.

14. The method of claim 13 , wherein the passive device comprises a FP filter.