Polarization-mode dispersion-induced outages in soliton transmission systems

The bit-error-rate (BER) degradation of conventional soliton systems due to polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) is investigated. It is found that the i nterplay between the, dispersive waves generated by PMD and adjacent solito n pulses will seriously degrade the BER of soliton systems, and make them e ven worse than linear systems if all other transmission impairments are neg lected. In order to achieve soliton robustness to PMD, some techniques to e liminate or reduce the dispersive waves must be employed, such as soliton c ontrol methods or dispersion-managed solitons. Different systems are estima ted and compared in terms of PMD-induced outage probability.