Gain Flattening of EDFA Using Hybrid EDFA/RFA with Reduced Channel Spacing

An efficient model of gain flattened hybrid optical amplifier consisting of Erbium doped fiber amplifier and Raman amplifier (EDFA/RFA) is proposed for 20x50 Gbps WDM system. This hybrid configuration has properties of both the amplifiers. The wavelength used for this optimization ranges from 1569 nm to 1577 nm, which lies in the C-band of optical communication to obtain uniform gain with less noise figure. Gain and noise figure are the most important characteristics of an amplifier to evaluate the performance. There are various parameters like fiber length, pump power, pump wavelength and number of channels on which the gain of an optical amplifier depends, by optimizing these parameters in Optisystem software the maximum value of gain obtained is 22.81 dB with variations of 2.79 dB and noise figure is maintained below 7 dB.