Periodic and Quasi-Periodic Compensation Strategies of Extreme Outages caused by Polarization Mode Dispersion and Amplifier Noise

Abstract

Effect of birefringent disorder on the Bit Error Rate (BER) in an optical fiber telecommunication system subject to amplifier noise may lead to extreme outages, related to anomalously large values of BER. We analyze the Probability Distribution Function (PDF) of BER for various strategies of Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) compensation. A compensation method is proposed that is capable of more efficient extreme outages suppression, which leads to substantial improvement of the fiber system performance.

3 pages, 1 figure, Submitted to IEEE Photonics Letters