Polarization-mode dispersion-induced outages in soliton transmission systems

The bit-error-rate (BER) degradation of conventional soliton systems due to polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) is investigated. It is found that the interplay between the dispersive waves generated by PMD and adjacent soliton pulses will seriously degrade the BER of soliton systems, and make them even worse than linear systems if all other transmission impairments are neglected. In order to achieve soliton robustness to PMD, some techniques to eliminate or reduce the dispersive waves must be employed, such as soliton control methods or dispersion-managed solitons. Different systems are estimated and compared in terms of PMD-induced outage probability.