This paper investigated the impact of receiver dispersion slope compensation for 40-Gb/s transoceanic transmission over conventional nonzero dispersion shifted fibers. Various differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) modulation formats were experimentally compared at 42.8 Gb/s [to account for forwarded error correction (FEC) overhead] with dispersion slope compensators at the receiver. These transmission measurements were performed in a circulating loop over a transatlantic distance of 6250 km using a variety of channel spacings, relative polarizations, and synchronous modulation techniques. All formats benefited from receiver dispersion slope compensation. For orthogonally polarized channels on 133-GHz spacing, the return-to-zero DPSK (RZ-DPSK) format performed the best; all channels (18 /spl times/ 40 Gb/s) propagated with > 13.5-dB Q-factor and with > 4-dB FEC margin. Whereas for copolarized channels on 100-GHz spacing, carrier-suppressed return-to-zero (CSRZ)-DPSK performed the best; all channels (25 /spl times/ 40 Gb/s) propagated with > 3-dB FEC margin. Moreover, it was shown that parallel launch only suffered a penalty of /spl sim/ 0.2 and /spl sim/ 0.5 dB relative to the orthogonal launch for 133and 100-GHz channel spacing, respectively. Finally, it was demonstrated that copolarized 40 Gb/s RZ-DPSK worked as well as 10 Gb/s RZ-ON-OFF keying (RZ-OOK) for the same spectral efficiency (30%) over the 6250 km of conventional nonzero dispersion shifted fibers (NZ-DSF) originally designed for 10 Gb/s transmission.
