Channel coding for polarization-mode dispersion limited optical fiber transmission

The effectiveness of turbo and Reed-Solomon coding in the presence of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) is investigated numerically in this paper. It is demonstrated that certain Turbo codes perform slightly better then Reed Solomon codes with equal overheads. For a fixed level of PMD and a fixed data-rate, there is an optimal code overhead. This is in contrast to the case of PMD-free optical channels, where high overhead codes perform best.