Gain-Stabilized Erbium-Doped Waveguide Amplifier for Burst Transmission

We demonstrate an optical gain-clamped waveguide amplifier robust against wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) burst transmission transients even with synchronous arrival of all packets. A maximum power excursion of about 0.3 dB is reported for the worst case under repeated burst arrivals. We show that a very small difference in burst periodicity generates completely different transient dynamics that may also self-impact the modulated channel. The impact of cavity design on amplification performance is reported. Nonlinear behavior is observed near system resonances. We observe burst transmission is a critical application, far more demanding than any use in reconfigurable WDM networks where only abrupt channel add-drop or link failure may occur