Comparison of polarization-mode dispersion tolerances in polarization-multiplexing systems with different modulation formats

The polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) tolerance of 10 Gb/s polarization-multiplexing (PM) system is investigated. Using the importance sampling (IS) method, the outage probabilities of the PM systems with three modulation formats, including on-off keying (OOK), differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) and differential quadrature phase-shift keying (DQPSK), are quantified. When the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise is assumed to be dominant, we evaluate the optical power penalties caused by the PMD effect at bit error rate (BER) of 10−12. The performance of compensated PM systems with variable optical delay line is also described. The simulation results indicate that the OOK signal with higher duty cycle (DC) performs better in the PM systems with PMD compensation. It is found that the higher-order PMD impairs seriously the performance of the PM system, and phase-keying formats are more sensitive to the PMD than the OOK.