title: Compensation for extreme outages caused by polarization mode dispersion and amplifier noise.
abstract: Fluctuations of Bit-Error-Rate (BER) stimulated by birefringent disorder in an optical fiber system are found to be strong. The effect may not be analyzed in terms of the average BER but rather requires analyzing the Probability Distribution Function (PDF) of BER. We report the emergence of the extremely extended algebraic-like tail of the PDF, corresponding to anomalously large values of BER. We analyze the dependence of the PDF tail, and thus the outage probability, on the first-order PMD compensation scheme. Effectiveness of compensation is illustrated quantitatively using a simple, however, practical example.
authors.forename: Vladimir
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Chernyak
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chertkov
authors.forename: Igor
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kolokolov
authors.forename: Vladimir
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lebedev