Abstract
An important figure of merit for the performance of optically amplified transmission systems is the average noise figure of the Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA’s). The average noise figure for a transmission system was recently shown to increase, rather than remain constant, as the total fiber span was increased to 3100 km and the number of EDFA’s was increased to 69. [1] This effect results in system impairment and was attributed to an active “polarization dependent loss” (PDL) mechanism which decreases the system gain for light polarized parallel to the signal while leaving light with orthogonal polarization unaffected.
© 1993 Optical Society of America
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