Limitation of PMD compensation due to polarization-dependent loss in high-speed optical transmission links

We have analyzed the effectiveness of two different polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) compensators in high-speed transmission systems suffering from polarization-dependent loss (PDL). When the link PDL value increases, the system performance improvement from the compensators decreases. Numerical analysis of a 10-Gb/s transmission system shows that even a small average link PDL of 0.5 dB could seriously limit the effectiveness of the PMD compensations.