Optical power limiting amplifier and its applications in an SONET self-healing ring network

The authors demonstrate an erbium-doped optical power limiting amplifier (OLA), study its noise characteristics, and discuss its application in the protection rings of a four-fiber, SONET self-healing interoffice ring network. System and network considerations are also presented. The feasibility of the network was tested by a system experiment using an OLA for up to 200-km conventional single-mode fiber transmission at a bit rate of 1.244 Gb/s (OC-24 line rate).<
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