Abstract

The invention of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) has opened the possibility of constructing optical fiber communication systems spanning very long distances without the need for electronic regeneration of optical pulses. In such systems, the fiber loss is periodically compensated by in-line optical amplifier gain G = exp(αℓ), where α denotes the attenuation constant of the fiber, and ℓ the length of a fiber span between adjacent amplifiers.

© 1993 Optical Society of America