Simplified Calculation of System Outage Caused by Polarization-Mode Dispersion

Measuring system outage probability using known combinations of first- and second-order polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) is a powerful technique that has been difficult to implement due to the obstacle of approximating the joint probability density function (PDF) of PMD. We describe a closed-form approximation to this joint PDF in terms of elementary functions and assess its accuracy by comparison with a previous numerical integration and by comparing marginalizations of the approximation to known theoretical distributions. We then present a simple calculation of PMD-induced outage probability based upon measured performance.