PMD-Induced Outage Probability in an Optical Communication System With Fast Polarization Scramblers and Time-Varying PMD Sections

Polarization-mode-dispersion (PMD) tolerance of an optical communication system with distributed fast polarization scramblers (PS's) and time-varying PMD sections in terms of outage probability (OP) is investigated. We show that with a moderate number of PS's (up to 14), the PMD mitigation technique using distributed fast PS's and a typical forward-error correction increases the PMD tolerance by up to ~50% at an OP of 10^-5. We provide a scaling rule to link the PMD tolerance in the system with fixed PMD sections to that with time-varying PMD sections. The implication of the Hinge model is briefly discussed.