Performance Evaluation of Hybrid Amplifiers

For several years, optical fiber communication systems are being extensively used all over the world for telecommunication, video and data transmission purposes. This is because optical fiber is capable of allowing the transmission of many signals over long distances. However, attenuation is the major limitation imposed by the transmission medium for long haul networks. So, with the growing transmission rates and demand in the field of optical communication, the electronic regeneration has become more expensive. Then, power optical amplifiers came into existence, which eliminated the costly conversions from optical to electrical signal and vice versa. Due to the need of longer unrepeated transmission distances Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical transport networks are expected to provide capacity required to satisfy growing volume of telecommunication traffic in a cost effective way. For optimum utilization of available fiber bandwidth, various combinations of optical amplifiers in different wavelength ranges are made. The combination of two or more amplifiers are termed as Hybrid amplifiers. Hybrid amplifiers are attractive in optical communication as they expand the system bandwidth in long haul transmission. In this work, different combinations of hybrid amplifiers are simulated using software OptSim 5.3 and their performance is compared with respect to transmission distance.The observation shows that SOA-RAMAN-EDFA is the best among all hybrid amplifier combinations in terms of Q factor, output power and eye opening.