PMD penalties in long nonsoliton systems and the effect of inline filtering

We consider the polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) tolerance of long nonsoliton systems. We find that the effect of PMD in such systems is to derail the nonlinear evolution of the waveform from its PMD-free trajectory at an early stage of transmission, leading to extremely high penalties at the receiver end. It is shown that PMD affects the propagating bandwidth in a way that is strongly correlated with the received penalty. Use of inline optical filters is shown to be extremely efficient in reducing the penalties caused by PMD.