Control of EDFA gain transient in optical burst network using burst

Abstract

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.