This paper numerically investigates the effects of dispersion on optical fibre chaotic communication, and proposes a dispersion compensation scheme to improve the performance of optical fibre chaotic communication system. The obtained results show that the transmitter-receiver synchronization progressively degrades and the signal-to-noise ratio of the recovered message deteriorates as the fibre length increases due to the dispersion accumulation. Two segments of 2.5-km dispersion-compensating fibres are symmetrically placed at both ends of a segment of 245-km nonzero dispersionshifted fibre with low dispersion in one compensation period. The numerical results show that the signal-to-noise ratio of the extracted 1 GHz sinusoidal message is improved from -2.92 dB to 15.38 dB by this dispersion compensation for the transmission distance of 500 km.
