Performance Outages in CWDM Optical Networks due to the Polarization-Dependent Gain of Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

This letter presents, for the first time, the derivation of analytical formulae for the probability density function and the cumulative density function (cdf) of the optical signal-to-noise ratio variation in optical local and metropolitan area networks employing coarse wavelength-division multiplexing due to the weak polarization-dependent gain (PDG) of cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). The cdf is used to calculate the outage probability and to derive specifications for the maximum allowable value of PDG per SOA in order to achieve a given network size.