Effect of Nonlinearity on PMD Compensation in a Single-Channel 10-Gb/s NRZ System

Abstract

We simulate a 2000-km 10-Gb/s single-channel NRZ system with different polarization mode dispersion compensation (PMDC) techniques and compare the effectiveness of compensation with linear and nonlinear signal propagation. Significant differences are found between the results of PMDC with and without nonlinearity for all the compensation techniques that are examined. An analysis of PMDC based on linear propagation would not properly characterize PMDC in the nonlinear case. A three-stage compensator controlled by optimizing the signal eye opening is found to give large performance improvement with nonlinear propagation compared to single-stage PMDC.