Abstract

The statistical behavior of pulse broadening in optical networks through the interaction of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) and polarization-dependent loss (PDL) is needed to predict real-world outage probabilities and to expand the limits of operation of installed networks. It is known that the interaction between PMD and PDL can combine to anomalously increase pulse broadening.^1,2 The statistical interplay has been studied in simulation.^1,4,5 Here we compare measured histograms of the installed fibers to simple simulations that indicate that the network under test does not conform with the results of these simple simulations.

© 2002 Optical Society of America