Experimental evaluation on OSNR and DMG performance of cascade FM-EDFA systems by equivalent input spectrum method

Abstract

An all-fiber few-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifier (FM-EDFA) is constructed by the integration of few-mode isolator wavelength division multiplexers (FM-IWDMs), which act as the multiplexing or demultiplexing function between signal and pump light. The gain performance of the FM-EDFAs under forward, bidirectional and backward pumping cases is investigated by experiment. For LP01, LP11e and LP11o-mode signals, the minimum differential mode gain (DMG) of 0.14 dB can be achieved by forward LP11e and LP11o-mode pumping. We propose the equivalent input spectrum method to experimentally simulate the cascade FM-EDFA systems. For the three-mode amplification, the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and overall DMG after 8-stage transmission are respectively 13.89 dB and 1.59 dB, which may theoretically support 1000 km-long transmission of 100 Gb/s DP-QPSK signal. A cascade amplification system composed of six-mode EDFA with the DMG of 1.35 dB is also considered to verify the feasibility of the equivalent input spectrum method.