Now available on OpticalCloudInfra website is a new high-level tutorial about optical amplification technology for high-capacity optical transport. This tutorial is designed for those interested in understanding the key optical transport technologies at play in today’s optical networks but who are not in photonics engineering positions.
This tutorial is made of four sections:
- The first one is a simple reminder of the optical amplification benefits for enabling multi-terabit long-haul networks. More about this was discussed in our first tutorial about optical transport, posted in February 2015.
- The second section introduces the most commonly deployed optical amplification technology, namely the Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplification (EDFA).
- The third part provides the readers with a high-level description of an alternative optical amplification technology – Raman amplification, conducive to wider optical spectrum and better optical noise performance.
- The last section is an introduction to the interaction between optical amplification, its subsequent optical noise, and fiber nonlinearities occurring while the signals propagate along the optical fiber. Optimized amplification strategy is required to maximize the reach with no compromise on the capacity.
As with our first tutorial about optical transport, this optical amplification tutorial assumes, for the sake of simplicity, the use of amplitude modulation and direct detection (like for 10 Gbit/s carriers). Most of the physical concepts apply to both direct detection with amplitude modulation, and coherent detection with amplitude/phase modulation.
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