The effort to build amplified multiwavelength lightwave networks that are large and reconfigurable has raised a host of hard technological challenges, ranging from device-level difficulties to transmission engineering to network-management concerns. Not least of these are the challenges posed by the spectral gain nonuniformities, and the associated multiwavelength noise performance, of such a network's cascaded optical amplifiers. This paper catalogs the research challenges posed by multiwavelength amplification in networks, summarizes the theory underlying them, and describes approaches that are emerging to lessen their ill effects.
Model and computational advancements to full vectorial Maxwell model for studying fiber amplifiers