Adaptive receiver structures for fiber communication systems employing polarization division multiplexing: high symbol rate case

Abstract

Polarization division multiplexing (PDM) has been proposed as a scheme for increasing data rates in fiber optic communication systems. In the PDM scheme, the use of two orthogonal polarizations as alternative data paths is a promising approach in terms of doubling the information rate relative to conventional schemes. However, due to the severe distortion caused by the propagation medium, especially the Polarization mode dispersion (PMD), the development of receiver compensation methods are critical for the deployment of PDM based transceivers. This article proposes a receiver compensation method for high symbol rate fiber optic communication links, where the two data streams sent through orthogonal polarizations are mixed by the fiber channel not only in space but also in time. The proposed receiver algorithm adaptively recovers the original pair of data streams from their space-time mixtures. We also provide simulation results for an end-to-end fiber communication link to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.