Performance Evaluation and Characterization of Hybrid Optical Amplifiers for Dwdm Systems at Ultra Narrow Channel Spacing

We study hybrid optical amplifiers (HOAs) for dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) systems at reduced channel spacing (<0.2 nm). The Raman erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) (R-E) and EDFA-semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) (E-S) hybrid optical amplifiers (HOAs) are investigated for the first time at 0.05 and 0.1 nm of the channel spacing. We show that the R-E HOA provides better gain (23.9 dB) and induces lesser crosstalk (-14.1 dB) with minimum utilization of the bandwidth. We report that 70 km is the optimum span distance at which the R-E HOA achieves a 2450 km transmission distance with acceptable performance. The theoretical results are found to be in accordance with numerical simulations in terms of the amplifier gain and induced crosstalk.