We propose a control technique for erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) gain transient occurring in optical burst
network. In the optical burst network, optical packets are generated randomly and packet stream has idle time when no
packet exists. This bursty nature of optical burst network causes gain transient in the EDFA with slow gain dynamics.
To resolve this problem, the optical power of a channel delivering the burst control packets (BCPs) is modulated based
on the information of the burst data (BD) packets contained in the BCP itself to feed constant power to the EDFA. We
experimentally demonstrate 2.0-dB and 2.6-dB reductions in power fluctuation and gain transient in EDFA output,
respectively. We show the stable transmission of 2.488 Gbit/s rate BCP and 9.953 Gbit/s rate BD packets using the
proposed technique. The proposed method can be applied to optical burst switching (OBS) network which adopt out-ofband
control channel covering small number of BD channels.