Polarization mode dispersion compensation for 10 Gbps over single mode fiber

The application of high-speed data transmission at a bit rate B>10 Gbps, through a single mode optical fiber (SMF) subject to polarization mode dispersion (PMD), is addressed in this paper. Two methods are proposed and compared for the mitigation of the induced and performance limiting intersymbol interference (ISI): the computationally simpler method of nonlinear threshold compensation (NLC), vs. the more complex but better performing method of maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE).