Performance evaluation of EDFA, RAMAN and SOA optical amplifier for WDM systems

In this paper 10 Gbps WDM systems at 16, 32 and 64 channels have been investigated with EDFA, RAMAN and SOA amplifiers individually and the performance has been compared on the basis of transmission distance and dispersion with and without nonlinearities. It is demonstrated that when the dispersion is 2 ps/nm/km and the number of channels are less, then SOA provide better results because as we increases the number of channels, the gain saturation problem arises due to cross gain modulation, the cross phase modulation and four wave mixing. When dispersion is increased from 2 to 10 ps/nm/km, EDFA provides better results than SOA in the term of BER and output power, but it shows non-uniform gain spectrum. We also observed that RAMAN amplifier provides better results for L band amplification and gain flatting issue because it can substantially reduce the impact of fiber nonlinearity.