Transmission degradation due to polarization-mode dispersion in linear and nonlinear systems

We have studied the performance of 40 Gbit/s linear and nonlinear dispersion managed solitons (DMS) in the presence of PMD. Particular attention was paid to the relation of the performance with individual fiber realizations. We found that the performance degradation can be severe for the nonlinear system if cumulative differential group delay (DGD) is large at early stage of the fiber. We also studied effectiveness of PMD compensation for both linear and nonlinear transmissions and showed that DOP may not be a good monitor signal especially for the nonlinear systems.