Discussion of power management in an optical WDM network

Power management is discussed based on a WDM optical test network, in which ring laser clamped EDFAs are used to compensate loss and only the optical attenuators is needed for power regulation. All channels at the output of each node are adjusted to a preset power level, so signal power fluctuations and differences between channels are not passed to the later nodes. The transmission performance is also studied and a simple expression is derived for evaluating the possible input power to the fiber and the possible transmission distance in optical networks. The accumulation of optical amplifier noise and the maximum input power for the stable gain of the lasing-clamped EDFA are the dominant factors limiting the network scale, and restrict the preset input power to the fiber.