Solitary waves in nonlocal NLS with dispersion averaged saturated nonlinearities

A nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLS) with dispersion averaged nonlinearity of saturated type is considered. Such a nonlocal NLS is of integro-differential type and it arises naturally in modeling fiber-optics communication systems with periodically varying dispersion profile (dispersion management). The associated constrained variational principle is shown to posses a ground state solution by constructing a convergent minimizing sequence through the application of a method similar to the classical concentration compactness principle of Lions. One of the obstacles in applying this variational approach is that a saturated nonlocal nonlinearity does not satisfy uniformly the so-called strict sub-additivity condition. This is overcome by applying a special version of Ekeland's variational principle.