Comparison of different feedback signals used in one stage PMD compensators for different modulation formats

As PMD compensation has become a very intense subject of research in recent years, the achievement of simple PMD compensators based on a feedback signal is a key issue. As PMD compensation uses a feedback indicator for system performance evaluation, such feedback signals must reproduce the DGD variations with time. In this paper, the correlation between DGD and different feedback signals is studied with a new method. This method is applied for various modulation schemes, leading to well-known results. By applying the method to the electrical and optical duobinary formats, it is shown that for duobinary signals, the DOP feedback signal shows the best correlation with instantaneous DGD value. Such a behavior of duobinary format is very interesting since duobinary modulation schemes are now considered for systems upgrades or mixed architectures (10 Gbit/s-40 Gbit/s on the same link). In such systems, PMD compensation has to be bit-rate independent which is available with the DOP as feedback indicator.