Assessment of system penalties induced by polarization mode dispersion in a 5 Gb/s optically amplified transoceanic link

The system penalties induced by polarization mode dispersion (PMD) in a 5 Gb/s optically amplified link are analyzed. A relation between differential group delays and system penalties is obtained from numerical simulations and used to derive analytic formulas for probability density functions of system penalties. Cumulated probabilities show that PMDs higher than 20 ps can induce significant fluctuations of the bit-error-rate (BER). Characterization of a 6200 km optically amplified link indicates that the relative contribution of PMD to these fluctuations is not significant when PMD is limited to 0.1 ps//spl radic/km. >