We examine the behavior of solitons in optical fibers where the disper
sion is alternated between the normal and anomalous regimes, The perio
dic nature of the system strongly modifies the shape of the stable sol
iton (solitary wave) pulses, and increases their energy when compared
with solitons in equivalent uniform fibers, Power enhancement factors
of up to 70 are numerically observed. This leads to both an increased
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver and reduced Gordon-Haus ti
ming jitter, The interaction between pairs of isolated pulses is exami
ned, We also examine implementations including periodic amplification,
and show that the energy scalings introduced by the amplification and
the dispersion management are independent provided that the periods o
f the two processes are dissimilar. We show that there is an optimum d
ispersion compensation ratio which minimizes the received Gordon-Haus
jitter, A digrammatic technique is presented for estimating the perfor
mance of dispersion compensated soliton transmission systems.