Interchannel pulse collision in a wavelength-division-multiplexed system with strong dispersion management

We develop a perturbation theory to analytically calculate the effects of complete and incomplete interchannel collisions of Gaussian pulses in a wavelength-division-multiplexed system with strong dispersion management. We show that, for complete collisions, the collision-induced frequency shift of a Gaussian pulse is negligible, whereas its position shift is significant and can be found in a simple analytical form. For strong dispersion management we find that incomplete collisions can be neglected, whereas for dispersion management of moderate strength the contribution of the incomplete collisions can be significant. The analytical predictions are in satisfactory agreement with numerical results. We also give an estimate of the limit imposed on the transmission distance by such collisions. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.