Evaluation of the impact of higher-order energy enhancement characteristics of solitons in strongly dispersion-managed optical fibers

Highlights: • Empirical model describing the pulse energy enhancement required to obtain stable pulses to higher-order polynomial equations • An improvement in the accuracy is obtained through the addition of a new quartic addend dependent on the map strength. • This conclusion is validated through a comparison in a commercial DM soliton submarine network. • The error in the interaction distance for two adjacent pulses in the same channel is of the same order as the energy error - Abstract: We study the propagation properties of nonlinear pulses with periodic evolution in a dispersion-managed transmission link by means of a variational approach. We fit the energy enhancement required for stable propagation of a single soliton in a prototypical commercial link to a polynomial approximation that describes the dependence of the energy on the map strength of the normalized unit cell. We present an improvement of a relatively old and essential result, namely, the dependence of the energy-enhancement factor of dispersion-management solitons with the square of the map strength of the fiber link. We find that adding additional corrections to the conventional quadratic formula up to the fourth order results in an improvement in the accuracy of the description of the numerical results obtained with the variational approximation. Even a small error in the energy is found to introduce large deviations in the pulse parameters during its evolution. The error in the evaluation of the interaction distance between two adjacent time division multiplexed pulses propagating in the same channel in a prototypical submarine link is of the same order as the error in the energy.