Impact of Temporal Interleaving of Polarization Tributaries Onto 100-Gb/s Coherent Transmission Systems With RZ Pulse Carving

We report in this letter on a 100-Gb/s spectrally efficient transmission over 16 x 100 km of standard single-mode fiber employing erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. We feed it with polarization-division-multiplexed quadrature phase-shift keying signals with 50% return-to-zero carving which we recover with coherent detection. We evaluate the impact of interleaving the polarization-multiplexed tributaries onto the tolerance to nonlinearities and we discuss in particular the benefit of this interleaving when nonlinear effects interact with polarization-mode-dispersion related impairments.