Design and Performance Analysis of EDFA and SOA for Optical WDM Networks: A Comparative Study

In the present paper, a comparative study between Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) has been reported. Among different available optical fibre amplifiers EDFA and SOA are considered in this work because these two amplifiers are used to provide higher gain with lower noise figure and a wider amplification band. Performance of SOA and EDFA has been compared in terms of improved noise figure, gain flatness, bit-error rate and output power analysis. Gain of optical amplifiers may be affected due to the dispersion by the fibre over a long distance. Dispersion compensation fibre may be used to reduce the dispersion loss in both the above mentioned cases. In this work an improvement in the signal quality due to the use of dispersion compensation fiber has also been reported. Results show that the EDFA offers better quality factor and gain flatness over SOA.