Experimental Validation of Numerical Simulations and Performance Analysis of a Coherent Optical-OFDM Transmission System Employing a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

In this paper, a numerical model of Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOA) is experimentally validated in terms of the Alpha Factor (αH) and the Four-Wave Mixing (FWM). Besides, a Coherent Optical-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CO-OFDM) simulation platform is used to confirm the good agreement between the measured and the simulated Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) of a received signal amplified by the studied SOA in an optical transmission link. In addition, the performance of the SOA on the amplification of a 10.94 Gb/s QPSK CO-OFDM signal is numerically analyzed with respect to the Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) noise, the Alpha Factor, the output saturation power of the SOA and the bit rate.