The performance of analog photonic links employing highly compressed erbium-doped fiber amplifiers

We present the tradeoffs of employing highly compressed erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) in analog microwave photonic links. We employ the newly developed concept of noise penalty and introduce the concept of generalized relative intensity noise to facilitate system design. Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that a highly compressed EDFA: 1) can achieve near shot-noise-limited performance, even with large optical noise figure and 2) can simultaneously increase the spurious-free dynamic range, increase the compression dynamic range, increase the analog gain, and decrease the analog noise figure, as compared to an unamplified link with identical components.