Theoretical Characterization and System Impact of the Hinge Model of PMD

Modeling of the polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) temporal changes in long fiber routes represents a critical aspect of system outage characterization. In this paper, an analysis of the PMD temporal statistics in links obeying the recently proposed hinge model is presented. The analytical expression of the differential group delay probability density function is derived and used to show that the outage probability is channel specific in a wavelength-division-multiplexed system. The existence of outage-free channels, which represents one of the most important implications of the hinge model, is demonstrated and quantified. The frequency dependence of the temporal statistics is also characterized, and an expression for PMD-induced pulse broadening is derived