Cost efficient amplifier placement and gain adjustment in all-Optical networks: A noise-minimizing approach

Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) are known to be well suited for transparent optical networks due to their proper relative properties. Link amplifiers are responsible for adequately compensating fiber loss in optical links. However, amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise would degrade the optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) which leads to degradation in quality of service (QoS). This paper aims at optimally determining the location and relative gain settings of the employed line amplifiers in order to minimize the total ASE noise power on each link. A non-linear optimization approach is developed. Then, two amplifier placement and gain adjustment algorithms called optimal EDFA placement (OEP) and Incremented-OEP are proposed. Numerical results in addition to simulations indicate the fact that the proposed schemes outperform the existing conventional EDFA placement (CEP) solution in terms of average ASE noise power and blocking rate.