Performance Limitations of an Optical Intensity Modulated-Direct Detection Transmission System Due to Polarization Mode Dispersion in a Single Mode Fiber

An analytical approach is presented to evaluate the impact of polarization mode dispersion on the average bit error rate (BER) performance of a intensity modulated direct detection (IM-DD) optical transmission system considering Maxwellian distribution for the differential group delay (DGD). The results show that the performance of an IM-DD system suffers power penalty of 0.27 dB, 0.45 dB and 2.4 dB corresponding to mean DGD of 20 ps, 35 ps and 40 ps respectively at a BER of 10^-9 operating at a bit rate of 10 Gb/s. Furthermore, at increased values of the mean DGD there occur BER floors above 10^-9 which can not be lowered by further increasing the signal power. It is noticed that BER floors occur at about 2times10 ^-9, 10^-7 and 10^-5 corresponding to mean DGD of 45 ps, 50 ps and 60 ps respectively at 10 Gb/s. The effect of PMD is found to be more detrimental at higher bit rates