Full characterization of modern transmission fibers for Raman amplified-based communication systems

Telecommunication carriers have to estimate the Raman parameters of the fibers installed on their optical transport networks in order to facilitate the design of the next generation of high bit-rate Raman amplified-based transmission systems. This paper reports a very complete characterization of the most popular modern transmission fibers in terms of Raman efficiency, noise figure and double Rayleigh backscattering crosstalk. Our experiment is based on an averaged power analysis, applied to a counter-pumped long-haul distributed fiber Raman amplifier. We evaluate as well at 40 Gb/s for these different fiber types the double Rayleigh backscattering impact in terms of Q-factor penalty for various Raman gains and RZ modulation formats with different duty cycles.