10-Gb/s PMD compensation following a recirculating fiber loop

Summary form only given. Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) has emerged as a critical issue for the deployment of high bit-rate systems over the installed fiber infrastructure. PMD is unique because it is a stochastic, dynamically changing process. Extensive research efforts have been made on PMD compensation in recent years. Reported experiments of PMD compensation are using either PMD emulators or in-ground fiber links to generate PMD. However, lumped PMD emulators cannot correctly taken into account the combined effect of fiber nonlinearity and PMD, while field trials lack flexibility for research. Because the chaotic behavior of PMD can vary from fiber to fiber, ensuring that a specific field-trial result will be applicable for different links is problematic. In this paper, PMD compensation following a 10-Gb/s, 8 /spl times/ 82-km recirculating fiber loop is demonstrated. We use a simple PMD compensator comprised of a polarization controller followed by a polarization-maintaining fiber with 42-ps differential group delay. For this system, with an average PMD of 27 ps, the bit-error-rate (BER) distribution tail at 5% probability can be reduced from 10/sup -6/ to 10/sup -8/ after PMD compensation, with the received power fixed at the level corresponding to a 10/sup -9/ BER without PMD.