PMD Compensation Using Coherent Detection and Linear Equalization Principles

摘要

Due to the growing demand of bandwidth in optical communication systems, the step towards 40 Gbit/s is inevitable. This step is limited mainly by the polarization mode dispersion of the fiber infrastructure. To extend the usability of the infrastructure it is necessary to employ PMD-compensation. The On/Off-keying modulation format in conjunction with direct detection is state of the art in high bitrate optical communication systems. But as a drawback, direct detection only provides an output signal which is proportional to the square of the absolute value of the electrical field and therefore transforms linear effects such as PMD into the nonlinear domain, which makes linear compensation schemes less effective. Coherent detection on the other hand delivers amplitude, phase and polarization information of the field and thus enables advanced PMD-compensation in the electrical domain. In our work, we employ optical coherent detection to receive two orthogonal components of the complex valued electrical field of an On/Off-keying modulated optical carrier. This single input multiple output system delivers us up to four output signals, I.e. real and imaginary part of the two detected polarization planes, which can be fed to feed forward equalizers or other electronic processing methods for an effective compensation of signal distortions caused by PMD. The required feed forward equalizer settings and their performance are presented.