The impact of dynamic gain transients in a dispersion-managed WDM system

As WDM systems evolve from simple point-to-point systems to dynamic reconfigurable networks transient behavior in cascaded erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) become an important issue to consider. The dynamical behavior of EDFAs is a result of the nonlinear dependence of the gain on input power and on the relatively long upper-state lifetime of the erbium ion. Previous work in this area was focused on understanding the transient phenomena in the time domain as a function of the number of amplifiers in the cascade. In the work we study the impact of these transients on the system Q and eye degradation. We also show the impact of an optically pre-amplified receiver.