A novel method is presented to design the configuration
of pumping lasers of Raman amplifiers using a multi-objective
particle swarm optimizer. The goal is to obtain the pump laser
wavelengths and powers that maximize the amplifier on-off gain,
while maintaining the flatness of the gain over the used bandwidth.
We used an algorithm called Multiple Objective Particle Swarm
Optimization with Crowding Distance and Roulette Wheel to
generate the non-dominated solutions, considering the average onoff
gain and the ripple of the amplifier over the transmission
bandwidth as the objectives in the optimization process. We
designed amplifiers using three, four and five pump lasers. The
experimental results showed that our proposal was able to design
Raman amplifiers with a gain ripple lower than 0.2 dB and with an
average on-off gain around 16.7 dB, when 20 signal channels and a
total pump power of 1 W were considered. Moreover, we
demonstrated that it is possible to allow the decision maker to
choose among many possible non-dominated solutions depending
on the application requirements.
