Performance assessment of dispersion-supported transmission at 10- and 20-Gb/s using a travelling-wave booster amplifier

We assess the performance of dispersion-supported transmission at 10- and 20-Gb/s using an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) or a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) as a booster amplifier. It is shown that at 10-Gb/s the use of a SOA as a booster amplifier improves the system performance for link lengths ranging from 12 to 50 km, due to partial chirp compensation in the SOA. At 20-Gb/s, the use of a SOA as a booster amplifier improves the system performance for link lengths ranging from 5 to 10 km, and degrades the system performance between 1.1 and 3.1 dB for link lengths ranging between 15 and 40 km. At 50 km the sensitivity degradation is about 4 dB.