Experimental Assessment of Interactions Between Nonlinear Impairments and Polarization-Mode Dispersion in 100-Gb/s Coherent Systems Versus Receiver Complexity

We investigate experimentally the tolerance to polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) of 100-Gb/s polarization- division-multiplexing quaternary phase-shift keying systems under nonlinear impairments. We show that nonlinear effects decrease the robustness of the system against PMD. Moreover, we study the dependence of this robustness on the complexity of the receiver.