The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 30, 2003
Filed:
Jul. 20, 1999
Sonali Banerjee, Eatontown, NJ (US);
Atul Kumar Srivastava, Eatontown, NJ (US);
James William Sulhoff, Ocean, NJ (US);
Yan Sun, Middletown, NJ (US);
Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, NJ (US);
Abstract
Distortion and crosstalk that occurs when operating optical amplifiers in saturation is substantially reduced by passively compensating for gain variations caused by changes in input power to the optical amplifiers. More specifically, in an optical communication system having one or more optical amplifiers, a “reservoir” optical channel is supplied in addition to the other traffic-carrying optical channels. The wavelength of the reservoir channel is selected such that the power level of the reservoir channel varies in response to changes in power levels of the traffic-carrying channels. Because gain variations are typically highest around the gain peak region in an optical amplifier's gain bandwidth, the reservoir channel in one exemplary embodiment is assigned a wavelength around the gain peak region. As such, the reservoir channel can absorb or otherwise receive most of the distortion and crosstalk while the traffic-carrying channels located away from the gain peak region will experience less distortion and crosstalk. -Importantly, this passive compensation scheme can be used in an amplified system which is operating in the presence of nonlinear distortions caused by gain variations, such as inter-modal distortion and saturation induced crosstalk.