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Challenges of 40 Gb/s WDM transmission

17 March 2001

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In addition to the required high-bandwidth electronics, wavelength-division-multiplexed 40 Gb/s transmission faces a number of challenges including optical-signal-to-noise ratio, dispersion and dispersion slope, and polarization mode dispersion. We discuss these issues as well as polarization multiplexing, a potential technique to achieve 0.8 bit/s/Hz spectral efficiency.