Deterministic approach to polarization mode dispersion

Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) is considered to be one of the most serious obstacles in the high speed optical telecommunication systems. This thesis focuses on a deterministic approach to both compensation and emulation of PMD. Most PMD compensation schemes in the literature rely on feedback loops to search for the optimum control parameters in the compensator. These schemes often suffer from slow response time and are limited to compensating the low orders of PMD. Adding control parameters to enable higher-order PMD compensation further increases the complexity of the feedback algorithm and its response time. As PMD can vary as fast as on a millisecond time scale, a potential method to alleviate this problem is to employ a deterministic approach to PMD compensation where the PMD parameters are first diagnosed and the compensator then set accordingly. One of the most challenging problems to this deterministic approach is the realtime monitoring of the PMD information. We propose an improved version of the PMD estimation technique using polarization scrambling and optical filtering. Once the PMD parameters are characterized, for first order PMD compensation, we present a novel module that can produce variable Differential Group Delay (DGD) without any second order PMD. We also discuss a feed-forward PMD compensator for first and second order PMD compensation. To allow for hybrid feed-forward and feedback PMD compensation scheme, we propose to decouple the first and second order PMD compensation by using a module that produces variable second order PMD without any first order PMD. To extend the compensation to all orders of PMD, instead of concatenating birefringent segments, we look into a compensator that is based on four stages of flexible frequency-dependent polarization rotations. These stages can be implemented using polarization beam splitting in combination with spatial light modulators or all-pass filters. For transmission systems where Polarization Dependent Loss (PDL) is an issue, we present a deterministic broadband PDL compensation. Another important area of research in PMD is its emulation. Traditional PMD emulators are built by cascading a large number of birefringent elements via polarization scramblers. There are two issues with these emulators. Firstly, they are costly and bulky due mainly to the large number of polarization scramblers involved. We