Scattering data computation for the Zakharov-Shabat system

A numerical method to solve the direct scattering problem for the Zakharov-Shabat system associated to the initial value problem for the nonlinear Schroedinger equation is proposed. The method involves the numerical solution of Volterra integral systems with structured kernels and the identification of coefficients and parameters appearing in monomial-exponential sums. Numerical experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.