FEC performance of PMD-impaired optical communication system with multiple-wavelength interleaving

In this letter, a novel wavelength-interleaved forward-error correction scheme to mitigate the polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) impairment in optical transmission system is proposed and analyzed. With double-wavelength interleaving and Reed Solomon (255, 239) coding, this method can extend the PMD tolerance by more than 20% at an output bit-error rate of 10^-12, and about 14%-36% for an outage probability of 10^-6, over a similar system without interleaving. It can also provide a net coding gain of over 6 dB at all tolerable PMD levels, which cannot be achieved by a noninterleaved system. For a four-wavelength interleaving system, the corresponding performance gains are over 26%.