Estimating EDFA output power with an efficient numerical modeling framework

Distributed and global power control strategies have been successfully applied to cascade of optical amplifiers with the aim of improving circuit OSNR values in WDM networks. For these or similar strategies to achieve their objectives, accurate estimators of the EDFA output power (EOP) are of the essence. These EOP estimators must take into account the amplifier characteristics including unequal power values of the input signals, frequency of each signal and desired target gain for each amplifier. The scope of this paper is to propose and assess the accuracy of three EOP efficient linear estimators. The EOP estimators are part of a framework comprising four modules, which are simple to implement and flexible to use. The proposed estimators are efficient in that they compute EOP estimates in seconds and require only a limited set of EDFA measured data.