J. of Electromagn. Waves and Appl., Vol. 21, No. 14, 2049–2058, 2007 INTERACTION OF SOLITONS IN A DISPERSION MANAGED OPTICAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM WITH ASYMMETRIC DISPERSION MAP M. Mishra † and S. Konar Department of Applied Physics Birla Institute of Technology Mesra, Ranchi-835215, India Abstract—Interaction of optical pulses in a dispersion managed optical communication system with asymmetric dispersion map has been investigated in this paper. The well known variational formulation has been employed to obtain several ordinary differential equations for various pulse parameters, and then the equations have been solved numerically to identify launching criterion in the first cell of the dispersion managed system. To investigate the effect of the ratio of anomalous fiber section length to the total map length on the pulse collision dynamics, the nonlinear Schr¨ odinger equation has been solved numerically. It has been found that, optimum system performance is achievable when the aforesaid ratio is approximately 0.7. With this ratio an improvement of approximately 25% in collision length has been predicted. 1. INTRODUCTION Hasegawa and Tappert [1,2] were the first to theoretically predict the existence of optical solitons in fibers, which subsequently was experimentally verified by Mollenauer et al. [3]. Since then there has been tremendous interest in the investigation of optical solitons in optical communication systems [1–11] and optical solitons have been investigated in both conventional and dispersion managed optical communication systems. A dispersion managed (DM) optical communication system offers considerable advantages over conventional optical communication systems owing to the reduction of † Also with Department of Applied Sciences and Humanities, United College of Engineering and Research, Allahabad-211010, India