A Theoretical Comparison of Robustness in Combating CD and PMD in Fiber-Optic Systems

We provide a theoretical comparison, in terms of system outage probability, of the effectiveness of several different approaches to counteract chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion in fiber-optic systems. After shortly recalling the approach to performance evaluation, performances for various modulation formats, line coding, receiver electronic processing techniques including maximum likelihood sequence detection, and optical equalizers with various taps are superimposed and discussed.