This book summarizes the proceedings of the invited talks presented at
the International Symposium on New Trends in Optical Soliton
Transmission Systems held in Kyoto during November 18 - 21, 1997. As a
result of worldwide demand for ultra high bitrate transmissions and
increased scientific interest from the soliton community, research on
optical solitons in fibres has made remarkable progress in recent years.
In view of these trends, the Research Group for Optical Soliton
Communications (ROSC), chaired by Akira Hasegawa, was established in
Japan in April 1995 to promote collaboration and information exchange
among communication service companies, industries and academic circles
in the theory and application of optical solitons. This symposium was
organized as a part of the ROSC activities. As with the 1 st ROSC
symposium, this symposium attracted enthusiastic response from worldwide
researchers involved in the subject of soliton based communications and
intensive discussions were held throughout the symposium. Particular
emphases were made to dispersion managements of soliton transmission. I
would like to note that in the }'t symposium the (adiabatic) dispersion
managements just began to appear in reducing radiation at amplifiers and
reducing collision effects in WDM system. These have become standard
this time, but in addition new, non-adiabatic dispersion managements
have been introduced independently by various scientists all over the
world.