The transmission performance of an all-optical closed-loop chaotic communication system is numerically studied, assuming various span lengths of dispersion shifted fiber between transmitter and receiver. Calculation of the mean synchronization error and Q-factor values obtained from the corresponding eye diagrams has been carried out for two encoding methods (chaotic modulation and chaos shift keying) and two repetition rates (2.4 and 5 Gbps). It is shown that transmission impairments including chromatic dispersion, fiber nonlinearity, fiber losses, and amplified spontaneous emission noise of the inline amplifiers degrade significantly the synchronization quality especially when high-bit-rate message encoding is applied. The influence of key system parameters such as launched optical power, amplifier spacing, positive or negative dispersion, etc., to the transmission performance has been investigated. Acceptable system performance can be achieved for approximately 200 km at 2.4 Gbps.
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