A detailed experimental study on single-pump Raman/EDFA hybrid amplifiers: Static, dynamic, and system performance comparison

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study on the performance comparison of three different schemes of single-pump dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF)-based Raman/erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) hybrid amplifiers together with a DCF-based Raman-only amplifier in terms of static properties, dynamic properties, and system impact: Raman-only amplifier (Tape I), Raman/EDFA hybrid amplifiers recycling residual Raman pump in a cascaded EDF located either after (Type II) or prior to (Type III) a DCF, and a Raman-assisted EDFA (Type IV), the concept of which was proposed by Kurosawa et al. With respect to the overall gain and system impact based on bit error rate (BER) measurements in a transmission system, the hybrid amplifier of Type II was found to have the best performance among the four types while the Raman-only amplifier shows the best tolerance to transient response.