Statistics of the system performance in a scrambled recirculating loop with PDL and PDG

We have demonstrated that with the loop-synchronous scrambling technique, the Q distribution of a recirculating loop closely resembles that of a straight-line system. By carefully choosing the scrambling rate, we show that slow scrambling at the transmitter improves the system performance and reduces the performance variation. We investigate the system performance for different polarization-dependent loss (PDL) levels and obtain excellent agreement between the experimental and simulation results. Our results show, for the first time, that the repolarization of the noise due to significant PDL causes an asymmetric Q-factor distribution.