Nortel Networks Corporation

Loren Scott Berg

Alan Glen Solheim

Robert William Keys

Mark R Hinds

Gregory Dean May

Stephane St-Laurent

A modular bidirectional optical amplification system includes a multiwavelength dual amplifier building block, a multiwavelength unidirectional booster amplifier BB, a unidirectional and a bidirectional Optical Service Channel (OSC) BB, an Intelligent Optical Terminal Accessway (IOTA) module, and an interleaved filter BB. The dual amplifier BB is available in a C-band version, an E-band version and a hybrid version, and provides unidirectional or bidirectional multichannel amplification. The booster amplifier is available in a C-band version, an E-band version and in a booster plus variant;. one for the C-band and one for E-band. The unidirectional and bidirectional OSC BBs provide a means for OAM&P functionality to the optical network. The IOTA BB provides multiplexing and demultiplexing, and the filter BB provides separation of the signal into grid-1 and grid-2 channels.

Highly scalable modular optical amplifier based subsystem

The invention is a transient suppression system for use with an optical amplifier having a specifiable total output optical power. The system measures the power in a filtered electronic version of WDM signals carrying information channels at both the input and the output of the amplifier. By attenuating very low-frequency and very high-frequency components of the converted optical signals, it is possible to obtain an accurate estimate of the aggregate power of the information channels without bias due to amplified spontaneous emissions or optical service channels. The output power estimate is divided by the input power estimate to give an estimate of the gain of the information channels, which is compared to a reference gain. The larger the difference, the greater the applied change in the output optical power of the amplifier. Under transient conditions, the input power estimate will change, causing a corresponding change in the estimated gain which is then used to control the specified value of the total optical gain fed to the optical amplifier. In this way, a constant signal gain can be maintained during transient conditions, such as when optical channels are added or dropped by upstream components in a WDM network.

Growing community of inventors

Kanata, Canada

Loren Scott Berg