Noise performance of optical fiber transmission links that use non-degenerate cascaded phase-sensitive amplifiers

: Based on semi-classical theory, the noise performance of a multispan fiber optical transmission system employing a cascaded phaseinsensitive amplifier (PIA) and phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) is investigated. Compared with the pure-PIA and pure-PSA based in-line amplification schemes, the copier + PSA scheme is found to improve the system NF by up to 6 and 3 dB, respectively, in an optimized long-haul fiber link. In addition, this cascaded configuration will significantly relax the requirement for accurate phase- and wavelength-locking which is rigorously needed in the pure-PSA configuration. This scheme is also modulation-format independent. As a proof of concept, the NF of a fiber parametric amplifier based copier + PSA cascade with inter-stage attenuation representing the fiber link is measured, which shows a 1.8-dB total NF improvement over the conventional EDFA cascade. 2010 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (060.2320) Fiber optics amplifiers and oscillators; (190.4380) Nonlinear optics, four-wave mixing.