The Impact of Polarization Mode Dispersion on Crosstalk in a Hybrid Optical Network

Abstract

The influence of polarization mode dispersion on crosstalk in optical networks is investigated for a hybrid optical network. Two different multiplexing schemes are studied and compared. Simulations are carried out to find outage probabilities resulting from the crosstalk. A polarization and timedivision multiplexed(PolTDM) system with 100 GHz channel spacing and 50 GHz filter bandwidth, is shown to satisfy availability demands for a mean DGD of up to 30 % of the bit period. In this case, crosstalk from side channels is also found to be small when compared to a polarization multiplexed system.