M. Karasek et al., Effectiveness of gain control in EDFAs against traffic with different levels of bursty behaviour, IEE P-OPTO, 147(5), 2000, pp. 355-362
Previous publications have addressed the impact of bursty, self-similar tra
ffic on erbium-doped fibre amplifiers (EDFA). Several gain control techniqu
es have been suggested to combat the gain fluctuations of EDFA with this ty
pe of traffic. The effectiveness of two such methods are investigated, name
ly highly inverted amplifiers and all-optical gain clamping, while varying
the parameters characterising the burstiness of the sources. While previous
publications have focused on the effect of the average load or activity fa
ctor, the paper further investigate the dependence on the relative variabil
ity of the packet burst lengths (ON times), and lengths of the interburst i
dle times (OFF times). Both gain control methods reduce the output power an
d signal-to-noise ratio excursions with respect to a standard amplifier cha
in. The authors find that, for an eight channel WDM system and a cascade of
six EDFAs, all-optical gain clamping can reduce the variations by a factor
of five, provided adequate power is present in the clamping laser, while h
ighly inverted amplifiers have variations reduced by a factor of two. The a
uthors find that, in a clamped chain, the source activity factor does not u
niquely determine the required level of lasing power. The authors also dedu
ce that information on the relative variability of ON and OFF times is esse
ntial.