Performance Degradation due to Polarization Effects in a Dispersion- Managed Soliton Recirculating Loop System
01 January 2004
We investigate the performance degradation in dispersion-managed soliton systems caused by polarization dependent loss (PDL) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) using a 600 km recirculating loop. We show that in an ultra-long haul transmission system, polarization effects can easily induce a variation in the bit error rate (BER) greater than two orders of magnitude. In addition, polarization scattering caused by soliton collisions in WDM systems makes the polarization induced BER variation smaller than that in single channel systems.