Mitigation of polarization-mode dispersion in multichannel lightwave transmission systems

We propose a novel polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) compensation scheme for wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) systems, in which many WDM channels share one or a few PMD compensators at receiver site. It is shown, both analytically and numerically, that this scheme can achieve virtually the same performance as that using perchannel-based PMD compensation.