Signal instability in a transmission system with cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers

Abstract

The transformation of phase into amplitude modulation, experimentally observed in a PSK system, can be explained by the action of an optical in-line filter. Furthermore it was shown that, caused by an interplay of in-line filtering and nonlinear effects induced by SOAs, arises for system parameters typical for an experiment. In conjunction with other noise sources this modulation instability has detrimental consequences for the system performance.