A deterministic broad-band polarization-dependent loss compensator

Polar decomposition of the transmission matrix allows lumped polarization-dependent loss (PDL) followed by lumped polarization mode dispersion (PMD) compensation at the receiver´s end. Thus, we propose in this paper, the architecture of a broad-band PDL compensator in a feed-forward compensation scheme. This module consists of three stages. Stage 1 and 2 are the frequency-dependent polarization rotators that align all the different PDL vectors into the {1,0,0} direction in Stokes space. Stage 3 eliminates both the PDL magnitude and the frequency dependence in the isotropic attenuation by introducing different frequency-dependent variable attenuation to the linear horizontal and vertical polarizations. By applying the known Mueller transformations of the PDL compensator to the monitored polarimetric data, we show that the composite PMD spectrum can be deduced for subsequent broad-band PMD compensation.