Method and apparatus for dispersion management in optical mesh networks

An optical mesh network comprising:

• a plurality of reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs), each including:
• a dispersion compensator for fully compensating the residual dispersion of a fiber link in the network;
• a de-interleaver coupled to the dispersion compensator for de-interleaving odd and even channels of a wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) signal;
• and
• a delay device coupled to the de-interleaver for introducing a delay to the odd channels or the even channels of the WDM signal to decorrelate the odd and even channels to substantially reduce inter-channel cross-phase modulation.

A method for dispersion management in a hybrid data rate optical mesh network comprising the steps of:

• fully compensating the residual dispersion of a fiber link (RDPL) at at least one node in the network;
• de-interleaving odd and even channels of a wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) signal;
• and
• introducing a delay between odd and even channels of the WDM signal to decorrelate odd and even channels to substantially reduce inter-channel cross-phase modulation.