Polarization diversity and equalization for PMD mitigation in optical communication systems

We show that electrical domain (post-detection) approaches hold great promise for mitigating distortions such as polarization mode dispersion (PMD) in optical communication systems, when they are used by taking the physical characteristics of the distortion into account. We present a polarization diversity receiver for PMD mitigation and show its effectiveness by simulation results using accurate modeling of the PMD distortion. We also note that by incorporating electronic equalization into the diversity receiver structure further performance improvements can be achieved. We evaluate the system outage probability by calculating the power penalty due to PMD distortion and show its agreement with the simulation results.