Dispersion of cascaded fiber gratings in WDM lightwave systems

Fiber gratings operating in the transmission mode can provide high dispersion at wavelengths close to the Bragg resonance. When multiple gratings are cascaded for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) applications, the net dispersion between the stop bands of any two consecutive gratings is significantly modified. We discuss the dispersion characteristics of such cascaded fiber gratings and propose a dispersion compensator for simultaneous compensation of group-velocity dispersion (GVD) for multiple channels of a WDM lightwave system. We also discuss the impact of the dispersion possessed by cascaded gratings on grating based add-drop multiplexers.