Hybrid distributed Raman/EDFA amplifier with hybrid automatic gain control for reconfigurable WDM optical networks

Abstract

Nowadays, optical amplifiers designs are induced by new requirements generated by optical networks. The introduction of WDM reconfigurable networks with increasing rate from 10-40 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s and beyond, demand new optical amplifiers development with improved gain spectral flatness and noise figure for all operational range of input powers and set-point gains. In this paper, it was developed a hybrid distributed Raman/EDFA amplifier with a novel hybrid gain control (HGC) scheme based on joint actuation. The HGC was firstly developed by numerical simulation and after experimentally, in a WDM system with 100 km SSMF fiber span and full C-band load. The Results shows an improved equivalent noise figure with flattened gain spectrum for all amplifier operation range in dynamic optical networks.

Keywords

• Hybrid optical amplifier
• Automatic gain control
• EDFA
• Raman amplifier
• WDM reconfigurable optical networks