Comparison of different modulation formats in terrestrial systems with high polarization mode dispersion

Abstract

We compare the performance of NRZ, RZ, dispersion-managed solitons, and pre-chirped RZ formats in the presence of high polarisation mode dispersion (PMD) for 10 Gbit/s terrestrial systems. Fiber nonlinearities and signal chirp interact with PMD-induced pulse distortion to generate clear trends in system power penalties. We show that chirped RZ pulses are more tolerant to high PMD values.