Power Consumption Analysis of Optical Repeater Subsystem in Multicore Fiber Link

The power consumption of optical repeater subsystems in a multicore fiber (MCF) link is analyzed via the simulation of an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) considering the power consumption of an ancillary function and an EDFA. Ancillary power consumption is attributed to nonessential functions that are required only for the subsystem to operate. In the analysis, the ancillary power consumption of optical repeater subsystems that employ multicore (MC) EDFAs is compared with subsystems that employ multiple conventional single-core (SC) EDFAs to determine whether an MC-EDFA has an advantage over the use of the number of cores (N
_c
) of SC-EDFAs in an MCF link. In a subsystem with a cladding-pumped MC-EDFA, the required sharable ancillary power consumption such that the total power consumption of the repeater subsystem with a cladding-pumped MC-EDFA is smaller than that with N
_c
of SC-EDFAs, is several tens of watts in the C-band, whereas it is less than 10 W in the L-band. This required sharable ancillary power consumption is converted to a ratio of required sharable ancillary power consumption to ancillary power consumption of a conventional subsystem. The ratios for the C-band is 30-100 %, and most of the ratio values for the L-band are less than 40 % with minimum values of 0 %. However, the L-band cladding-pumped MC-EDFA has a 3-dB poorer noise figure compared to that for SC-EDFA, which makes the L-band cladding-pumped MC-EDFA achieve a higher output power to maintain the optical signal to noise ratio and may introduce the degradation caused by nonlinear optical effects. In contrast, the required sharable ancillary power consumption for a subsystem with a core-pumped MC-EDFA is a few watts and less than 10 W for the C- and L-bands, respectively. This implies that most of the required sharable ancillary power consumption ratio values for the C- and L-bands are less than 10 % and 40 %, respectively. In terms of power consumption, a cladding-pumped MC-EDFA has less advantage over the N
_c
of SC-EDFAs, and a core-pumped MC-EDFA may have an advantage over the N
_c
of SC-EDFA if the size of a core-pumped MC-EDFA is reduced to a value smaller than the N
_c
of the SC-EDFA by integrating MCF amplifier components.