OPTIMIZATION OF LARGE-SCALE FIBER SENSOR ARRAYS INCORPORATING MULTIPLE OPTICAL AMPLIFIERS - PART II - PUMP POWER

We discuss how to minimize the pump power required for large-scale fib er sensor arrays employing erbiumdoped fiber amplifier (EDFA) telemetr y with respect to the number of amplifiers per bus, number of sensors per rung, and the gain per amplifier, For a large array, the pump powe r requirement is dominated by passive component losses along the array , We investigate several methods, including alternative array topologi es, to reduce the power requirement while minimizing the impact on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), We define an optimum topology which requ ires less than 1 W of 1480 nm pump power per bus to support 200 high s ensitivity (1 mu rad/root Hz) sensors on a pair of fiber buses, a powe r requirement that is reasonable and attainable with available laser d iodes.