Polarization-Time coded OFDM for PDL mitigation in long-haul optical transmission systems

We experimentally demonstrate the potential of Polarization-Time codes in mitigating PDL in long-haul transmissions. The Silver code exhibits the best performance (2dB Q-penalty reduction at a PDL of 6dB). Moreover, for inline PDL, it improves the mean Q-factor by 0.6dB while significantly narrowing the variance of the corresponding distribution.