Performance comparison of the 1310nm optical amplifiers

One of the key optical transmission components are optical amplifiers. In this paper studies on the amplification properties of the 1310 nm optical amplifiers are presented. The evaluated optical amplifiers are: semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) and praseodymium doped fibre amplifier (PDFA). The study is aimed to the dynamic operation in single-and multi-wavelength domain with the high rate signals namely 25 Gbit/s. The maximum obtained gain was 25.0 dB for SOA and 20.9 dB for PDFA. For the SOAs the minimum achieved value of the receiver sensitivity was -11.5 dBm for single channel and -11.5 dBm for DWDM case when for PDFA those values were -11.0 dBm and -10.9 respectively. The main advantage of the PDFA in comparison to the measured SOAs is higher saturation power.