A study of the optimum fiber design for a distributed Raman amplification transmission system

In this letter, we describe numerically the relationship between optical fiber parameters and the transmission performance of distributed Raman amplification (DRA) in terms of signal-to-noise ratio characteristics and nonlinear impairment. In our calculation, we fully considered the dopant dependence of the optical fiber parameters with regard to DRA transmission performance. Our calculated results show that an optimization of the relationship between the relative index difference and the effective area makes it possible to design an optical fiber that efficiently utilizes DRA.