Advanced o-band communications enabled by a novel bismuth-doped fibre amplifier

Abstract

Current optical transmission systems, based on erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) equipped wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission in the C-band, are gradually being driven towards their capacity limits due to the rapid growth of data traffic. Several routes for increasing transmission capacity have been heavily investigated in recent years and it is unclear as of yet which solutions will be adopted. One solution is to increase the bandwidth utilisation of standard single-mode fibre (SMF) by pursuing transmission in regions beyond the C-band and doing so requires the availability of high-gain, low-noise amplifiers in the region of interest. The objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the enablement of WDM transmission in the O-band by a newly developed bismuth-doped fibre amplifier (BDFA), offering high gain between 1320nm and 1370nm. This BDFA delivers effective, low-noise amplification and may finally provide an amplification solution for the O-band that is analogous to the ubiquitous C-band EDFA. If the BDFA is to be extensively used in the future, it will be necessary to undertake its characterisation by similar means to that performed on the EDFA in the early days of its development. This thesis reports the first parameterisation of the O-band BDFA in terms of its gain parameters and frequency-resolved noise figure to provide confidence in its performance and advise in its future development. To prove its practicality, the BDFA is successfully deployed in an amplified WDM O-band transmission testbed. The work further investigates the nonlinear performance of the BDFA as well as its transient characteristics. Finally, this thesis proposes an application of alternate-mark inversion to mitigate the nonlinearity in O-band transmission by applying it to on-off-keying and 4-level pulse amplitude modulation formats, the latter being the first time such a format has been demonstrated. Altogether, the results of this thesis suggest that the BDFA is a promising solution for O-band WDM systems.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Periklis Petropoulos: orcid.org/0000-0002-1576-8034

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