2.5 Gb/s x 16-channel bidirectional WDM transmission system using bidirectional erbium-doped fiber amplifier based on spectrally interleaved synchronized etalon filters

The implemented a bidirectional erbium-doped fiber amplifier using two spectrally interleaved synchronized etalon filters. This amplifier was used to demonstrate 2.5 Gb/s/spl times/16 channel bidirectional wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) transmission over 160-km-long single mode fiber. No power penalty was observed in receiver sensitivity caused by relative intensity noise. In addition, we measured the performance of the concatenated amplifiers using a recirculating loop. The results show that it would be possible to use the proposed amplifier for the transmission of bidirectional WDM signals over seven amplifier spans (/spl sim/560 km) with a span loss of 20 dB.