POLARIZATION STATISTICS OF CROSSTALK-INDUCED NOISE IN TRANSPARENT LIGHTWAVE NETWORKS

In transparent lightwave networks, small component-crosstalk imperfect ions are known to generate interferometric noise levels that are signi ficant under the worst case of matched signal and crosstalk polarizati ons, but vanish for orthogonal polarizations. We show that, contrary t o intuition, performance under random polarizations is skewed toward w orst-case, and that deployed networks must accordingly be designed for it.