Performance Comparison of Single-Pump FOPA and LRA in a 16-channel DWDM Transmission System

Sergejs Olonkins,Julija Putrina,Vjaceslavs Bobrovs

doi:10.5755/j01.eie.25.1.22740

Abstract

Raman amplifiers and Fiber optical parametric amplifiers (FOPA) are positioned as the main future leading techniques for all-optical signal amplification. Distributed Raman amplifiers are known as the least noisy, but this type of amplifiers suffers from poor pumping efficiency at low input signal powers, therefore, discrete (lumped) Raman amplifiers (LRA) could be used instead. Both FOPAs and LRAs are the likeliest replacements of conventional EDFAs, but at this point it is not clear which of these two approaches is the most promising taking into account the quality of the amplified signal. Therefore, the goal of this article is to determine which of the two amplification techniques ensures less amplifier produced signal impairments in a 16-channel 10 Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) transmission system.DOI: 10.5755/j01.eie.25.1.22740

Highlights

During the last couple of decades, the demand for higher network capacity has been constantly increasing under the influence of all-time growing availability of broadband multimedia services and machine to machine applications
The process of parametric amplification is highly dependent on the phase mismatch between the interacting optical fields, amplification efficiency of Fiber optical parametric amplifiers (FOPA) dramatically decreases throughout the high non-linearity fiber (HNLF), along with accumulating dispersion caused linear phase mismatch between the pump and the signal
At a certain point the amount of fiber non-linearity produced signal impairments becomes so high that it significantly degrades the quality of the amplified signal the main idea of configuring the amplifiers was, at first, to find the lowest pump power that was capable of ensured BER values below the 10-12 threshold in all 16 channels in the system with the FOPA for a certain length of the HNLF fiber

Summary

Introduction

During the last couple of decades, the demand for higher network capacity has been constantly increasing under the influence of all-time growing availability of broadband multimedia services and machine to machine applications. Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast states that yearly global IP traffic will reach 3.3 ZB by the end of 2021 [1] This pushes research in fiber optical communications to seek for ways to increase transmission speeds and improving performance of existing transmission systems [2], [3]. Increasing the number of channels is the most common ways to extend the throughput of a wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) transmission system, as this does not require replacement of the expensive transmitter and receiver end hardware. Such approach uses broader wavelength band for transmission. The amplification band of conventional erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA), that are used in modern transmission systems, is highly limited (1530 nm–1562 nm), and at some point EDFAs will not be able to ensure gain over the whole wavelength band used for transmission in such systems [4], [5]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion