Reflectometric measurement of polarization dependent loss in fiber optic links

Polarization sensitive optical reflectometry is an effective tool for measuring birefringence and polarization mode dispersion of fiber optic links. Classical measurement techniques are based on the polarization analysis of the transmitted field, therefore they require access to both the ends of the optical link. Any typical optical link, made of a concatenation of optical single-mode fibers and optical devices, may be described with a Jones matrix F(z).