Combatting dispersion effects in slotted optical rings

We show that dispersion-impaired slotted WDM optical rings can be maintained synchronous with a single, bypassable dispersion compensation module (DCM) per node. We propose a planning algorithm to determine on which nodes this DCM should be activated. We derive a value for this DCM that is for suitable a wide range of network parameters, and we show that the planning algorithm is robust to uncertainties on the input parameters (physical link lengths)