Impact of Burst Size and Inter-Arrival Time in All-Optical Gain Clamping Amplification for Optical Burst Switched Networks

This paper considers an optical burst switching network of 16 WDM channels amplified by all-optical gain clamped erbium-doped fiber amplifier. Experimental and numerical investigations are carried out in order to determine the impact of the burst length and inter-arrival time in the performance of stabilized amplification. The results show that the design of synchronous burst networks should take into account the characteristics of the clamped amplifier, whereas for asynchronous transmission, the power ripples induced by the critical cases may be neglected.