Effects of optical filter drifts in wavelength division multiplexing system with cascaded optical amplifiers

Abstract

We report the analysis and results on an optically amplified WDM system with a cascade of optical amplifier-filter pairs. System performance is described by receiver electrical SNR (SNR/sub e/). The WDM system consists of m equally spaced optical channels and n stages of amplifier-filter pairs. In an ideal situation, each filter frequency is perfectly aligned with the laser frequency. The EDFA is assumed to operate with a constant total output power model. Two cases are considered. One is the "worst case" where all filters have a drift of /spl Delta/f, the other is the "best" case where only one filter suffers a drift of /spl Delta/f. For both cases, the system analyzed has eight 2.5 Gb/s.