Performance investigation of hybrid optical amplifiers for high-speed optical networks

Abstract

The development of lightwave systems required large capacity communication networks in today’s high-tech era. To fulfill these challenges required proper amplification of the signals. Hybrid optical amplifier made a remarkable change in present optical networks in order to amplify the signals for better performance of a system. In this paper, we have proposed different hybrid optical amplifier configurations [such as semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), EDFA-EDFA, Raman-EDFA] at channel spacing of 0.8 nm for 8 × 10 Gbps for wavelength division multiplexed optical networks. The performance is examined on the basis of quality factor (dB), maximum output power (dBm), minimum bit error rate (BER), and minimum eye closure by varying the transmission distance from 20 to 180 km. It is demonstrated that Raman-EDFA configuration provides better results for the small distances up to 100 km as compared to EDFA-EDFA and SOA-EDFA configurations. The variation in Q factor for Raman-EDFA, EDFA-EDFA, and SOA-EDFA is 33.35–13.56 dB, 32.30–10.95 dB, and 18.52–25.03 dB, respectively. When distance is increased from 100 to 180 km, SOA-EDFA provides better results than Raman-EDFA in terms of BER, but it shows non-uniform gain spectrum.