EDFA adaptive gain control effect analysis over an amplifier cascade in a DWDM optical system

In this paper, we analyze the EDFA adaptive gain control impact on 80 modulated C-band channels (10 Gbps NRZ) in a DWDM optical system composed of four cascaded amplifiers. System performance was evaluated in terms of channels optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR), noise figure (NF), bit error rate (BER), and gain flatness (GF) measurements. The adaptive EDFA scheme aims to optimize NF and GF spectra by adjusting its setpoint gain based on static information about these parameters and was improved here to prioritize NF when BER of the received signal remains under the FEC limit.