Degradation Model for Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers to Reduce Network Downtime

Abstract : The outage of optical components like optical amplifiers and cross connects reduces the availability of a network and increases the operational expenditures of network operators. Responsible for this is the repair process of optical components which takes very long, because of the large distances in the field. The detection of performance degradation of erbium-doped amplifiers (EDFAs) can be used to reduce the repair time by changing an EDFA before it fails. With the knowledge of the degradation state the remaining life time of an EDFA can be calculated, enabling the operator to plan the replacement of EDFAs to avoid longer outage times. In this paper, an 1,000 km link and a German backbone network are used to simulate the aging of EDFAs with aging curves. Additionally the operational expenditures are considered to compare the cost of the repair process of EDFAs.