Assessment and mitigation of Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers (EDFA) gain transients in hybrid wavelength division multiplexing/time division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM/TDM PON) in the presence of packet-based traffic

In this study, the authors present an innovative gain clamping method to mitigate Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers transients under bursty or packetised traffic. This method is based on a lasing technique by means of a continuous wave feedback signal reflected on a fibre Bragg grating. The clamping was assessed using on a range of re-injected powers from -30 to -5-dBm and able to fully mitigate the packet transients. The performance of the system at 2.5 and 10.0-Gb-s was appraised for different inter-packets times being observed in all cases an improvement in the Q factor. Additionally, a study that includes a characterisation of the transients (gain excursion and decaying time) with the inter-packet parameters and a comparison with theory was also presented.