EDFA transient assessment for bursty traffic

In this paper, we investigate experimentally the impact of optical amplifiers, namely Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA) on Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks, operating at the typical bit rate for current passive optical networks ( PON), 2.5 Gb/s. A packet with 2 16 - 1 pseudo random binary sequence (PRBS) with an idle length equal to 50000 was studied under different pumping powers of the EDFA. To assess the impact of transients on the system performance, the gain excursion and signal to noise ratio (SNR) were measure and eye diagrams were analyzed. It was observed that as the pump power increases (driving current from 0.80 A to 1.50 A, the SNR and the extinction ratio decrease 3.59 dB and 2.33 dB respectively, while the gain excursion increases 8.4 dB.