Abstract

Optical amplifiers to be used in fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) applications will need to cope with input power fluctuations due to the packet based nature of the transported data traffic and/or frequent add/drop of WDM channels. We have recently proposed and demonstrated distributed Raman amplification as a promising approach to build a bidirectional, single fiber, long-reach passive optical network (PON) link for FTTP [1], Compared to EDFAs, Raman amplification has been found to generate smaller power peaks when used with burst-mode traffic [2], However, the sensitivity penalties arising from transients in Raman amplified links have, to our knowledge, not been measured and published. Here, penalty measurements on a weak data channel, under the influence of two strong neighbouring channels, being periodically added and dropped in the proposed Raman-based PON link, is reported for the first time.

© 2007 IEEE