Development of high performance fiber Raman amplication systems for optical fiber communications

Abstract

Fiber Raman amplification (FRA) has been studied intensively since 1990s owing to its potential applications in fiber optic communication systems. Compared with the lumped erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), the distributed Raman amplification (DRA) takes the advantages that: 1) amplification can be provided at any frequency by simply changing the pump wavelength; 2) any existing transmission line can be upgraded directly to DRA by simply adding pumps accordingly; 3) the Raman gain distributed over tens of kilometers of transmission fiber provides in a superior end-ofsystem optical signal-to-noise-ratio (OSNR).