Statistical properties of the DGD in a long-haul optical fiber system with temporally drifting birefringence

Due to the temporal drift of the fiber birefringence in an optical fiber transmission system, the polarization mode dispersion (PMD) effects measured in a time window can be quite different for different time windows of the same duration. Every 10 s for 10 days, the accumulated differential group delay (DGD) was repeatedly measured at 5000 km in a 107-km recirculating loop with loop-synchronous polarization scrambling. In each DGD measurement, the polarization dispersion vector of the 107-km-long fiber was also measured. To model the measured temporal variation of the DGD, two different perturbation algorithms were used to construct random walks through the configuration space of birefringent fibers, where each fiber realization is determined by the standard coarse-step method. With these simulation models, the statistical properties of the spread of the DGD samples over a finite time period were reproduced.