Abstract

The advantage of distributed Raman amplification (DRA) is to achieve seamless ultra-wide signal bandwidth [1-3]. In general, when we use many such optical amplifiers in a cascade to configure a multi-repeater system, such as transoceanic systems, remote supervisory of each repeater is one of the crucial technological issues for practical applications. In transoceanic systems using EDFA repeaters, one of the commonly used techniques to obtain necessary information on the health of the repeater is to modulate the gain of the repeater slightly by intensity-modulating the pump LD so that the health data measured at the repeater can be superimposed on the outgoing signal light carrying high-speed data [4]. In applying such a well-established supervisory scheme to ultra-wideband DRA repeaters with a multi-wavelength pump light source, it is very important to know the gain modulation dynamics of such ultra-wideband DRAs. So far, we have studied the basic gain modulation characteristics of an ultra-wideband DRA [5]. In this report, we show the impact of pump failure on gain modulation dynamics using an 80nm-band high-power backward-pumped Raman amplifier with a four-wavelength pump light source

© 2003 Optical Society of America