Signaling techniques using solitons

Abstract

Solitons and the nonlinear evolution equations that support them arise in the description of a wide range of nonlinear physical phenomena including shallow water waves, piezoelectrics, and optical transmission in nonlinear fibers. Although such systems are nonlinear, they are exactly solvable and possess a class of remarkably robust solutions, known as solitons, which satisfy a nonlinear form of superposition. By exploiting the properties of solitons, such nonlinear systems may be attractive for a variety of signal processing problems including multiple access communications, private or low power transmission, and multiresolution transmission. We outline a number of modulation techniques using solitons, and explore some of the properties of such systems in the presence of additive channel corruption. We also discuss the use of a nonlinear LC network (transmission line model) and its soliton solutions for signal synthesis in a variety of modulation techniques.