Polarization Dependence in Optical OFDM Transmission

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a transmission technique which has attracted attention in modern communication systems, e.g. DSL and wireless LAN. This principle has been applied recently to optical transmission. The performance of two different implementations of an optical OFDM system is investigated in the presence of differential group delay (DGD). In a second step both architectures are extended to polariza-tion diversity receivers. Improvement is achieved by diversity combining at the expense of increased complexity.