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In the most general case, all three components—the discrete eigenvalues, the discrete spectral amplitudes, and the continuous spectrum—of the nonlinear Fourier transform of a signal can be independently modulated. This paper examines information transmission using only the discrete eigenvalues, and presents heuristic designs for multisoliton signal sets with spectral efficiencies greater than 3 b/s/Hz. The first design, called multieigenvalue position encoding, is based on an exhaustive search followed by pruning of the signal set to remove high pulsewidth or high bandwidth outliers. The second design, called trellis encoding, achieves comparable efficiencies to the fist method at much lower complexity. These multisoliton signals do not undergo any pulse broadening, but are significantly limited by bandwidth expansion if the system length is not much smaller than the dispersion length parameter. This limitation suggests that modulating the eigenvalues alone cannot address the problem of nonlinearity in commercial fiber transmission systems, and that our proposed methods are only meaningful when dispersion is very small and dominated by nonlinearity, e.g., close to the zero-dispersion wavelength at 1300 nm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT), a powerful tool in soliton theory and exactly solvable models, is a method for solving integrable partial differential equations governing wave propagation in certain nonlinear media. The NFT decorrelates signal degrees-of-freedom in such models, in much the same way that the Fourier transform does for linear systems. In this three-part series of papers, this observation is exploited for data transmission over integrable channels, such as optical fibers, where pulse propagation is governed by the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. In this transmission scheme, which can be viewed as a nonlinear analogue of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing commonly used in linear channels, information is encoded in the nonlinear frequencies and their spectral amplitudes. Unlike most other fiber-optic transmission schemes, this technique deals with both dispersion and nonlinearity directly and unconditionally without the need for dispersion or nonlinearity compensation methods. This paper explains the mathematical tools that underlie the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, numerical methods are suggested to compute the discrete and the continuous spectrum of a signal with respect to the Zakharov-Shabat system, a Lax operator underlying numerous integrable communication channels including the nonlinear Schrödinger channel, modeling pulse propagation in optical fibers. These methods are subsequently tested and their ability to estimate the spectrum are compared against each other. These methods are used to compute the spectrum of various signals commonly used in the optical fiber communications. It is found that the layer peeling and the spectral methods are suitable schemes to estimate the nonlinear spectra with good accuracy. To illustrate the structure of the spectrum, the locus of the eigenvalues is determined under amplitude and phase modulation in a number of examples. It is observed that in some cases, as signal parameters vary, eigenvalues collide and change their course of motion. The real axis is typically the place from which new eigenvalues originate or, are absorbed into after traveling a trajectory in the complex plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]