Polarization mode dispersion and its mitigation in optical networks

PMD effects impose severe penalties on older fiber plants at 10Gb/s and on virtually all plants at 40Gb/s. An optical compensator can mitigate these penalties, allowing error-free performance without severely limiting the regenerator distances. A repeatable, calibrated PMD emulator allows thorough testing of a polarisation mode dispersion compensator (PMDC) and the calculation of outage probabilities used by system designers.