Fast dynamics and power swings in doped-fiber amplifiers fed by highly variable multimedia traffic

Summary form only given. Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) transient gain dynamics in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission systems for circuit-switching applications have recently been shown to be rather slow, in the range of tens to hundreds of /spl mu/s. We show here that such dynamics can be much faster, and give rise to large power swings, in a packet switching environment with highly variable packet interarrival times, such as with self-similar traffic.