Compensation of higher order polarization-mode dispersion using phase modulation and polarization control in the transmitter

We demonstrate a higher order polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) compensation scheme using a polarization controller and a phase modulator in the transmitter, as well as a traditional first-order compensator in the receiver. The effectiveness of this approach is experimentally demonstrated for a 10-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) transmission over a link with an average PMD of 50 ps. Under this large PMD condition, the system power penalty can be reduced from /spl sim/4 dB that is achieved with a first-order compensator to 1 dB using the proposed technique. According to a reasonable outage criterion, simulation results show that the tolerance to average PMD for the 40-Gb/s NRZ system is improved to /spl sim/10 ps, as compared to the 7-ps value using only first-order PMD compensation. Such improvement may double the PMD-limited transmission distance.