Comparative Analysis of Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) and Raman Optical Amplifier (ROA) in Nonlinear-CWDM System

The massive demands for high-rate application drove the telecommunication service to use large bandwidth capacity. The Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM), a common use in Metro-WDM, can be a solution to provide large bandwidth in optical communications. In a communications system, there are attenuation and nonlinear effect decreasing the system performance. In order to overcome the limitation imposed by electrical regeneration to maintain system performance, a means of optical amplification was sought. In this paper presents the comparison of two competing technologies emerged: Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) and Raman Optical Amplifier (ROA) to overcome the attenuation in the nonlinear system. We designed the CWDM system using 8 channels with 20 nm channel spacing and 60 km length. The result was conducted by varying the CW Laser power using -8, -6, -4, -2, 0, 2, 4, and 6 dBm. Based on the result of the research, raman amplification can maintain the BER and the Q-factor of the CWDM system better than EDFA. In addition, the received power in raman amplification larger than that received in EDFA. In conclusion,a CWDM system using ROA amplifier has better performance for the system than using EDFA amplifier.