Influences of polarization-mode dispersion on soliton transmission systems

In soliton transmission systems with polarization-mode dispersion (PMD), random birefringence causes solitons to generate dispersive waves, which degrade soliton transmission systems in two aspects. First, the dispersive waves cause solitons to continuously lose energy, thus induce pulse broadening. Second, the dispersive waves interact with other soliton pulses and cause distortion of a sequence of soliton pulses. Both of these effects induce performance degradation of soliton transmission systems. We study these effects of PMD on both conventional and dispersion-managed (DM) soliton transmission systems. We show that, for conventional soliton systems, although single pulse has robustness to PMD, the interplay between the dispersive waves and solitons would seriously distort a sequence of pulses and make soliton systems worse than linear systems if all other transmission impairments are neglected. We also show that DM solitons are more robust to PMD than both conventional solitons and linear systems due to the enhanced nonlinearity and less sensitivity of DM solitons to perturbations. We further point out that soliton collision-induced polarization scattering causes additional timing jitter and system performance penalty in WDM soliton systems