Comparative Studies of Thulium and Erbium-doped Fiber Amplifiers for Dynamic Optical WDM Networks

In this study, a two-level laser system model is presented to simulate the dynamic performance of the thulium-doped fiber amplifier around transmission window. We used the numerical methods to investigate the influences of channels drop in thulium-doped fiber amplifier performance and compare to that in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier at 1.55.μm region. Our findings revealed that the dynamic performance of a thulium-doped amplifier is smaller than for an erbium-doped fiber amplifier. The optical gain-clamping technique is proposed to reduce the effects of power transients in both optical amplifiers due to the channels drop in reconfigurable WDM system. We illustrate that the optical gain-clamped technique is more efficient when applied to thulium-doped fiber amplifier than erbium-doped fiber amplifier. As a result, the thulium-doped fiber amplifier shows greater stability with a larger broadband to enable high capacity WDM transmission.