Performance evaluation of bidirectional optical amplifiers for amplified passive optical network based on broadband light source seeded optical sources

We have evaluated the performances of bidirectional optical amplifiers which were suited for the cost-effective implementation of amplified bidirectional passive optical networks (PONs). First, we measured the maximum gains of two simple bidirectional optical amplifiers implemented without using any optical components for the suppression of reflected signals. From the results, the maximum gains of two simple bidirectional amplifiers with a broadband light source (BLS) seeded optical source were limited to be 27 dB due to the reflection-induced in-band crosstalk, when the reflectance coefficients were measured to be -33 dB in both directions. Then, we have also implemented a bidirectional optical amplifier with two band splitters for the amplified bidirectional PON where the two different wavelength bands were allocated to the downstream and upstream signals transmission. In our measurement, we confirmed that the maximum gain of bidirectional optical amplifier with two band splitters could be increased to more than 30 dB owing to the efficient suppression of in-band crosstalk.