Adaptive PMD compensation up to second-order in 40Gb/s OTDM optical communication system using two-stage compensator

Abstract

In this paper we report a successful experiment of adaptive polarization mode dispersion (PMD) compensation up to second-order in a 40Gb/s optical time-division multiplexed (OTDM) communication system by using two-stage compensator. In the experiment the PMD monitoring technique based on degree of polarization (DOP) was adopted. And the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm was introduced in adaptive PMD compensation, with the desirable features of fast convergence to the global optimum point for compensation without being trapped in local sub-optima and with good robustness to noise. The comparison was made to estimate the performance effectiveness between PSO algorithms with global neighborhood structure (GPSO) and with local neighborhood structure (LPSO). The LPSO algorithm is shown to be more effective to search global optimum for PMD compensation than GPSO algorithm. The ability of tracking changed PMD using PSO algorithm was also investigated. The two-stage PMD compensator is shown to be effective for both first- and second-order PMD, and the compensator is shown to be bit rate independent. The compensation time is within several hundreds of milliseconds. The response time for recovery from a sharp disturbance is about 11ms.