Effects of Nonlinearities on PMD-Induced System Impairments

It is well known that cross-phase-modulation-induced polarization rotation, cross-polarization modulation (XPolM), significantly degrades the performance of polarization-mode-dispersion (PMD) compensators. In this paper, the research on XPolM is reviewed, unique simulations of XPolM in the presence of walk off are presented, and some pitfalls are demonstrated with respect to choice of data streams in such simulations. Then, the authors discuss how XPolM affects PMD and PMD-induced outage probabilities (OP) in fiber-communication systems by providing analytical formulas for the OP with and without XPolM. Finally, the XPolM and PMD compensation are tied together by giving simple rules of thumb for when XPolM degrades PMD compensated systems, and PMD mitigation methods that are robust to XPolM are discussed