FEC performance of optical communication systems with PMD and wavelength interleaving

A new wavelength-interleaved FEC scheme to alleviate PMD (polarization mode dispersion) impairment in optical transmission systems is proposed and analysed. With two wavelengths. interleaved and RS (255, 239) coding, this method can extend the PMD tolerance by over 20% at an output BER of 10
^-12
, and about 14-36% for an outage probability of 10
^-6
, compared to a similar system without wavelength interleaving. It can also provide a net coding gain of over 6 dB at all tolerable PMD levels, which cannot be achieved by a non-interleaved system. For a four-wavelength interleaving system, the corresponding performance gains are more than 26%.