Dual-band fiber optic parametric amplifier for bi-directional transient-sensitive fiber optical transmission links.

We demonstrate an in-line polarization-insensitive fiber optic parametric amplifier (PI-FOPA) to simultaneously amplify burst and non-burst signals transmitted in opposite directions in C and L bands. The PI-FOPA provides >16 dB polarization insensitive net gain for signals which are 53 nm apart and counter-propagating in an extended reach link: an upstream bursty signal at 1533 nm and a downstream non-burst signal at 1586 nm. The PI-FOPA potential application as an in-line dual-band amplifier in transient-sensitive communication links is demonstrated by its employment in an extended reach access network with a symmetric 10 Gbps capacity.

Fibre optic parametric amplifier for high capacity burst-mode access networks.

We compare performance of a polarization insensitive fiber optic parametric amplifier (PI-FOPA), a commercial erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and a discrete Raman amplifier (DRA) in a 50 km long-reach optical access network transmitting bursts of 10 Gbps signal with traffic density ranged from 5% to 97%. We demonstrate that for the same power budget the PI-FOPA allows for transmission of bursty traffic with density up to 97% while DRA and EDFA are limited to 30% and 15%, respectively. Alternatively, we demonstrate PI-FOPA to allow for 3 dB and 5 dB higher power budget than the DRA and EDFA, respectively, for the worst case scenario of 75% traffic density.

Experimental comparison of fiber optic parametric, Raman and erbium amplifiers for burst traffic for extended reach PONs.

We experimentally compare the performance of a polarization-independent fiber optic parametric amplifier (FOPA), a discrete Raman amplifier and a commercial erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) for burst traffic amplification in extended reach passive optical networks (PON). We demonstrate that EDFA and Raman amplifiers suffer from severe transient effects, causing penalty on receiver sensitivity >5 dB for traffic bursts of 10 Gbps on-off keying signal shorter than 10 µs. On the other hand, we demonstrate that FOPA does not introduce a penalty on receiver sensitivity when amplifying signal bursts as short as 5 µs as compared to a non-burst signal. Therefore, FOPA used as a drop-in replacement for an EDFA or Raman amplifier allows us to improve receiver sensitivity by >3 dB for short signal bursts. We conclude that FOPA allows substantially increased power budget for an extended reach PON transmitting variable duration bursts. In addition, we identify the maximum burst duration tolerated by each examined amplifier.

Fiber nonlinearity-induced penalty reduction in CO-OFDM by ANN-based nonlinear equalization.

We experimentally demonstrate ∼2 dB quality (Q)-factor enhancement in terms of fiber nonlinearity compensation of 40 Gb/s 16 quadrature amplitude modulation coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing at 2000 km, using a nonlinear equalizer (NLE) based on artificial neural networks (ANN). Nonlinearity alleviation depends on escalation of the ANN training overhead and the signal bit rate, reporting ∼4 dBQ-factor enhancement at 70 Gb/s, whereas a reduction of the number of ANN neurons annihilates the NLE performance. An enhanced performance by up to ∼2 dB in Q-factor compared to the inverse Volterra-series transfer function NLE leads to a breakthrough in the efficiency of ANN.