PMD Induced Outage Probability in an Optical Communication System with Fast Polarization Scramblers and Time-Varying PMD Sections

Abstract—Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) induced outage probability (OP) in an optical communication system with distributed fast polarization scramblers (PS's) and time-varying PMD sections is investigated. We show that with a moderate number of PS's (up to 14), the PMD mitigation technique using distributed fast PS's and forward-error correction increases the PMD tolerance by up to ~50% . We also provide a scaling rule to link the PMD tolerance obtained in the simple mode, where each section has a fixed differential group delay, to the PMD tolerance in practical systems with respect to OP.