The effects of PMD and PDL on the performance of OOK and DPSK systems

Using multiple importance sampling (MIS) technique, the optical communication system performance affected by polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) and polarization-dependent loss (PDL) is simulated numerically. The power penalties and system outage probabilities are obtained for optical communication systems with on-off keying (OOK) or differential phase shift keying (DPSK) modulation. The simulation results show that DPSK always performs better than OOK. When the system has moderate PDL (about 1.5 dB), it is necessary to compensate effectively the fiber PMD in order to enhance the system tolerance to the PMD and PDL. However, the efficiency of PMD compensation will degrade rapidly when the PMD of the whole optical link drops into the low value.