Investigation of Polarization Mode Dispersion Influence to Different Optical Signal Modulation Formats

Increasing data rates in the fiber optics transmission systems leads to more new limiting factors which complicates the signal transmission. One of such factors is the optical fiber birefringence induced polarization mode dispersion (PMD). Although PMD value in typical standard single mode fiber is quite low (less than 0.2 ps/âkm for ITU-T G.652D standard fiber) higher data rates sets higher requirements for signal quality. In this research comparison between three different modulation formats (traditional on-off keying, differential phase shift keying (DPSK) and polarization shift keying (PolSK)) is given at different optical fiber PMD levels and data transmission rates. It is found that most significant impact of PMD is to traditional on-off keying modulation format, but the best performance showed DPSK modulated signals.