PMD Tolerance Testing of a Commercial Communication System Using a Spectral Polarimeter

A stress study methodology for polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) tolerance testing of commercial telecommunication systems is reported. By inserting additional PMD and using intralink polarization scrambling, multiple configurations of the fiber parameter space are sampled. By monitoring both the preforward-error-correction bit error rates and the spectrally resolved states of polarization or string lengths, the error rates are correlated with the PMD-induced system degradation, and it is shown that it is not correlated with power or optical signal-to-noise-ratio fluctuations. Configurations with the PMD uniformly distributed across the link and lumped at the transmitter or receiver ends are also compared