Optical amplifier: A key element of high speed optical network

Optical communication systems are employed to meet the challenge of high bandwidth demand. But signal attenuation is the major limitation for high-speed long-distance optical systems and networks. Electronic regeneration of the signal is used to overcome this problem, but it in creases the cost of network and introduces the latency. To overcome this, electronic regeneration is replaced by optical amplifiers, which eliminate the need for costly conversions from optical to electrical signal and vice-versa. In this paper, performance of optical amplifier has been analyzed. Performance of Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) has been analysed for different fiber lengths, core radius, and numerical aperture. Performance of Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) has been analyzed for different injection current for the same network. Its is found that EDFA gives better performance with 18m fiber length, 2.2μm core radius and 0.24 numerical aperture. SOA performs better with 0.05mA injection current. Also, detail analysis of the performance of both the amplifiers for a WDM network shows that EDFA give favourable results than SOA.