The Impact of PMD on Single-Polarization Nonlinear Frequency Division Multiplexing

Abstract

The impact of polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is studied on the single-polarization signal transmission over the continuous spectrum (CS) of a long-haul optical fiber link defined by nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT). It is shown that a linear all-order PMD compensation can reverse most of PMD effects in the temporal domain. However, due to the nonlinear interaction of the two polarization modes, the CS is distorted in the nonlinear spectral domain. Simulation results are presented, and a perturbation model is proposed based on the simulation results to describe the impact of PMD for different modulation formats and fiber parameters. It is demonstrated that, after linear PMD compensation, the residual polarization-dependent effects generate a constellation rotation and additional noise in the nonlinear spectral domain. The performance of NFT-based system in the presence of both PMD and amplifier noise is also studied. The results show that the effect of PMD is small provided that an efficient linear PMD compensation is performed in time domain.