Multi-Channel PMD Mitigation and Outage Prevention Through FEC with Sub-Burst-Error-Correcting PMD Scrambling

We propose a multichannel polarization-mode-dispersion (PMD) mitigation scheme in which forward-error-correction (FEC) is utilized in conjunction with distributed fast polarization scrambling that changes the link PMD to at least two random states within each burst-error-correcting-period, simultaneously for all WDM channels. By limiting PMD induced "outages" to last shorter than the correcting period, FEC can effectively correct the dominating errors occurred during the outages. Analytical and numerical results show nearly doubled system tolerance to PMD and dramatically reduced outage probability in NRZ on-off-keyed and differential phase-shift-keyed transmissions by using the proposed scheme with a standard Reed-Solomon FEC code.