Impact of PMD on four-wave-mixing-induced crosstalk in WDM systems

Journal article, 2000

The impact of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) on four-wave mixing crosstalk in wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) fiber systems is quantified on a commercial system. It is found that even a small amount of PMD reduces the benefit of using polarization-multiplexed channels for suppression of crosstalk. As a rule of thumb, it is suggested that polarization-multiplexed schemes are of significant interest only when system differential group-delay (DGD) is smaller than DGD <1/(4Δf), where Δf is the channel-spacing.