BER Performance of MDL-Impaired MIMO-SDM Systems With Finite Constellation Inputs

We evaluate the effect of mode-dependent loss (MDL) on the bit-error-ratio (BER) performance of optical multiple-input-multiple-output space-division multiplexing (MIMO-SDM) systems using finite signal constellations and maximum likelihood detection. Through analyses and numerical simulations, we study the signal-to-noise-ratio penalty incurred by MDL as a function of various system parameters.