Remotely Pumped Hybrid Amplifiers for Extended Bidirectional Passive Optical Networks

In this contribution, we optimize design parameters of hybrid optical amplifiers utilizing distributed Raman amplification in transmission fiber and gain of discrete, remotely pumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) for wideband, bidirectional operation in metropolitan area networks (MAN). The design is based on an application of a numerical model, which takes into account pump-to-pump and signal-to-signal interactions and generation of amplified spontaneous emission in the Raman amplifier and solves the standard rate-propagation equations in an erbium-doped fiber (EDF). We predict 12 dB gain across 72 nm of optical bandwidth with gain ripple better than 10%. The recently proposed serial topology of EDFA is considered; this enables the wideband, bidirectional operation of a hybrid amplifier with only two pump laser diodes emitting in the 1430 and 1480 nm bands.