Review on optical solitons for long haul transmission

Abstract

Abstract Fiber optics telecommunication is the currently established backbone infrastructure for most of the information flow across the world. New services and applications are causing an exponential increase in Internet traffic, increasing transmission rate, and high bandwidth-demanding applications have been propelling the data rate per wavelength to approach the speed limit of electronics. In a few years, the current fiber optic communication system infrastructure will not be able to meet this demand because fiber nonlinearity dramatically limits the information transmission rate. Also, the dispersion phenomenon is a problem for high bit rates and long-haul optical communication systems. An easy solution to this problem is optical solitons pulses that preserve their shape over long distances. An optical soliton is formed by balancing nonlinearity (self-phase modulation) and dispersion phenomenon (group velocity dispersion). In this review article, a detailed study of optical solitons is presented along with its recent progress. Advanced numerical methods such as Darboux transform (DT), digital back propagation, split step Fourier, and forward–backward methods are also discussed in this paper which is used for solving higher-order solitons.