Digital Equalization of Chromatic Dispersion and Polarization Mode Dispersion

In this paper, we consider a fractionally spaced equalizer (FSE) for electronic compensation of chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) in a dually polarized (polarization-multiplexed) coherent optical communications system. Our results show that the FSE can compensate any arbitrary amount of CD and first-order PMD distortion, provided that the oversampling rate is at least 3/2 and that a sufficient number of equalizer taps are used. In contrast, the amount of CD and PMD that can be corrected by a symbol-rate equalizer only approaches an asymptotic limit, and increasing the number of taps has no effect on performance due to aliasing that causes signal cancellation and noise enhancement.