Abstract

When chromatic dispersion in optical fibres no longer limits the data rate of transmission systems, polarization mode dispersion (PMD) may become the major limiting factor. Various techniques exists for measuring the PMD as an average in a fibre link while, to our knowledge, only one method for characterization of distributed PMD has been suggested [1], which is focused on measuring fibre birefringence in short fibres. We propose a novel non-destructive technique for measuring the accumulation of PMD along a fibre link. The idea is to create a map of fixed-analyser spectra [2] along a fibre, from which the accumulated differential group delay (DGD) and the corresponding PMD can be derived.

© 1998 IEEE