Abstract
We present a rigorous investigation on how to optimize
the degrees of freedom of optical polarization mode dispersion (PMD) compensators
composed of differential group delay sections and polarization controllers,
up to two stages. The analytical treatment relies on the extracted
Jones matrices of the transmission and compensation fibers. The
analysis of a single-stage compensator with two degrees of freedom (fixed
DGD) is based on the maximization of the eye opening, as provided by the generalized Chen formula. The outage probability
is quantified through a fast semi-analytical technique. It is shown how the
benefits of single-stage compensation are strongly reduced and can lead to
outage events, when certain critical input states of polarization are launched
into transmission fibers with strong eigenmodes depolarization (i.e., strong
higher order PMD). Focusing on such transmission fibers and input configurations,
a novel algorithm is introduced for controlling a double-stage compensator
with five degrees of freedom. The algorithm is based on an ideal equalization
of the transmission fiber at half the bit-rate, realized resorting to spherical
geometry. To this aim, we show that the first compensator stage must be a
PMF fiber with very large DGD, equal to the bit period, in order to compensate
the most critical configurations associated with outage events.
© 2008 IEEE
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