An approximated technique to quickly optimize the gain profile of multi-pump broadband hybrid amplifiers under residual pump recycling in WDM systems is proposed. It is based on the amplifier spectral equalization by adjusting the flexible gain profile of a multi-pump Raman amplification stage to compensate the Erbium-doped stage gain variation within the C-band. In order to increase the pump power efficiency, the Erbium-doped fiber section recycles the residual Raman pump. Three different cases considering, respectively, one, two, and three pumps are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The characterization of the Raman+EDFA hybrid amplifier has been performed in terms of global gain, ripple, and noise figure. The proposed optimization method for the Raman pump sets allows ripple figures to be reduced by half of their original values in single pumped configurations. Our results also suggest that two pump lasers is the best configuration when the maximum gain, minimum ripple, and pump power efficiency are simultaneously considered.
EDFAs; hybrid optical amplifiers; pump recycling; stimulated Raman scattering; WDM
