Erbium-doped fiber amplet and its application as a modular bandwidth management subsystem for dispersion compensation and power management

A narrowband optical amplifier ("amplet") is proposed and demonstrated that can be constructed into an amplifier-based subsystem to perform dispersion compensation and dynamic power management in a wide DWDM bandwidth. The am plet is designed to inherently provide two important networking features: n arrowband accessibility and bandwidth scalability. The narrowband accessibi lity allows for the realization of inline dispersion compensation and dynam ic gain management; and the bandwidth scalability provides an economic solu tion to meet capacity demand. As a demonstration, a modular bandwidth manag ement subsystem is developed using this amplet technology to simultaneously provide dispersion compensation, dynamic power management, and amplificati on. The experimental results show that wide band dynamic gain control is ac hieved using this new bandwidth management architecture. We demonstrate sys tem power penalties less than 1 dB using this subsystem in a long-haul syst em testbed with accumulated dispersion varying from -600 to - 1600ps/nm. (C ) 2001 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.