Have You Hugged Your Fiber Today?

Steve Yao

The information explosion ignited by the Internet has created an insatiable appetite for bandwidth. To appease the bandwidth hunger, most telecommunications operators are pushed to increase the per-channel data rate of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems. Systems based on the 10-Gb/s channel rate are being deployed, and 40-Gb/s systems are on the horizon.

Unfortunately, as the bit rate increases, communications networks become increasingly sensitive to polarization-related impairments such as polarization mode dispersion in optical fibers, polarization-dependent loss in passive optical components, polarization-dependent modulation in electro-optic modulators and polarization-dependent gain in optical amplifiers...