This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at
the "International Symposium on Massive TDM and WDM Optical Soliton Tra-
mission Systems" held in Kyoto during November 9-12, 1999. The symposium
is the third of the series organized by Research Group for Optical
Soliton C- munications (ROSC) chaired by Akira Hasegawa. The research
group, ROSC, was established in Japan in April 1995 with a support of
the Japanese Ministry of Post and Telecommunications to promote
collaboration and information - change among communication service
companies, communication industries and academic circles in the theory
and application of optical solitons. The symposium attracted
enthusiastic response from worldwide researchers in the field of soliton
based communications and intensive discussions were made. In the
symposium held in 1997, new concept of soliton transmission based on
dispersion management of optical fibers were presented. This new soliton
is now called the dispersion managed soliton. The present symposium
mainly focuses the theoretical and experimental developments of
dispersion managed solitons. It is remarkable that the concept of the
dispersion managed soliton, which was just born two years ago when the
naming was not even given yet, has become the center of soliton research
in two years. The dispersion managed soliton has an enhanced power in
maintaining reasonable signal to noise ratio, yet has reduced
Gordon-Haus timing jitter by reduced averagedispersion. The dispersion
managed soliton also has demonstrated its power in soliton based WDM
transmissions.
