Investigation of Saturable Optical Receiver (SOR) for Fiber to the Home Network

Abstract

<p> Due to the high cost, telephone and cable television companies can only justify installing fiber optical networks to remote sites which serve up to a few hundred customers. For customers located at variable distances from the transmitting station, they will receive signals at different strengths. The signal stability and system reliability of FTTH network affected largely by the distance. We propose an effective solution for the enhancement of signal stability of FTTH network, which uses a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) coupled with an optical receiver.</p> <p> Before the signal reaches the optical receiver at the user end, signal strength is automatically adjusted through a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Due to the special saturation property of SOA, the output optical signal will have very small fluctuation regardless the input optical signal power, the signal stability of FTTH network will be improved significantly. A set of simplified governing equations of SOA has been proposed and the corresponding numerical solver has been implemented. Although the main focus is primarily the SOA, a simplified optical receiver is also simulated, which comprises a PIN photodetector and a low pass filter (LPF). All simulations have been carried out in the time-domain with the frequency domain low pass filter modeled by a digital filter.</p>