On the Benefits of Optical Gain-Clamped Amplification in Optical Burst Switching Networks

This paper investigates the performance of an all-optical method for amplification gain control to be applied in the next generation of optical networks. An erbium-doped fiber amplifier is implemented in a simple and passive all-optical configuration known as optical gain-clamped optical amplifier (OA). The paper investigates the dynamic performance of the OA and discusses the interplay of amplifier dynamics with different traffic statistics. The investigation concerns exhaustive characterization of bit error rate performances under typical optical burst switching (OBS) traffic as well as special case of sudden power variation at the amplifier input. All obtained results show a reduction in the amplifier output power overshot compared to the case where the same OA operates without any gain stabilization technique. As an example, in the typical OBS traffic scenario, a reduction of 3 dB is observed.