Suppression of transient phenomena in hybrid Raman/EDF amplifier

Transient phenomena of hybrid Raman/erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) upon optical channel add-drop are investigated. The transient responses of surviving channels are resulted from the combined dynamics of Raman amplifier and EDFA. It is shown that the suggested method employing fast gain control of EDFA only can effectively suppress the transient variation of output power. The transient-suppressing hybrid Raman/EDFA is proven to be enough for wavelength-division-multiplexing networks including reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer and/or transparent optical cross-connect, if the optical switching speed is carefully chosen.