A simple strategy to design broadband low power consumption distributed Raman amplifier

Abstract

Abstract-In this work, a simple strategy to design wideband low power consumption Raman amplifiers is demonstrated for a threepump configuration using a low water peak optical fiber. The approach is based on the introduction of a novel numerical measure, which quantifies and isolates pump-pump interaction contribution to gain profile and analyzes its correlation to amplifier minimum ripple. The method tailors the amplifier gain spectrum over 80nm bandwidth with a ripple smaller than 1dB, a gain on the order of 4dB for up to 75km fiber length, and a total pump power consumption smaller than 300mW.Index Terms-Optical Communications, Raman Amplifiers, Raman Amplifier Optimization I. INTRODUCTION Recent advances in Internet-based applications accessible for both commercial and residential customers as well as evolving social networks still increases the traffic growth throughout the network. Additionally, low price mobile services, are also forcing a huge increment on the capacity demand [1]. Among the key technologies to respond to these needs are low loss modern fibers, which make possible 40THz optical window (the O, E, S, C and L bands) system operation, and wideband Raman optical amplifiers.Over the past years, techniques and methodologies to design wideband Raman amplifiers have been reported in the literature [2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. These techniques use multiple pumps, around five to eight, to achieve an 80 nm bandwidth with a ripple better than 0.1dB. The drawback of such approaches is the high power consumption in the Raman amplification module, and the use of complex and time consuming numerical optimization routines to find the best combination of pump power and wavelengths [9][10]. Table I shows previous works reported in the literature regarding the number of pumps lasers, total power consumption and ripple for Raman amplifiers with approximately 80 nm bandwidth.A simple strategy to design broadband low power consumption distributed Raman amplifier Renan S. Santos, Maria Aparecida G. Martinez, Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca, Photonics Lab, Electrical Engineering Department, Avenida Maracanã, 229, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20271-110, renansilvasantos@gmail.com, magmartinez@gmail.com Maria Thereza M. R. Giraldi Instituto Militar de Engenharia, Photonics Lab,Electrical Engineering Department, Praça General Tibúrcio, 80, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 22290-270, mtmrocco@ime.eb.br Journal of Microwaves, Optoelectronics and Electromagnetic Applications, Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2017 In addition, since the interest concerning environmental issues is intensifying, the use of low power consumption devices and systems will be a necessity in the near future. Consequently, future networks should have the capacity to provide a massive quantity of bandwidth in an energy efficient way [1]. Another concern in modern long-haul broadband fiber optic communication systems using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) is the minimization of the amplifier ripple [11][12]. In this work...