We determine the dispersion profile of a dispersion decreasing fiber(DDF) for optimum pulse compression from a trade-off between high pulse compression and low pedestal power/short DDF length. We find that the optimum vlaue of the exponential dispersion decreasing factor .alpha. is 0.95 and that the corresponding optimum fiber length is 1.5 times of the initial soliton period. Passing through the dDF, ~10 times of pulse comparession ratio can be achieved without significant increase in pedestal power. To compress relatively broad pulses using a given DDF optimized at a specific pulse width, we also detemrine the optimum input pulse amplitude, as a function of input pulse width.