Joint compensation of CD and PMD in direct-detected OFDM transmission using polarization-time coding

We propose and demonstrate a polarization-time coding (PTC) method which can effectively compensate both the CD and first order PMD in direct-detected OFDM transmission. Compared with the previous methods, the proposed PTC not only alleviates the need for the complex dynamic polarization controller but also exhibits superior transparencies to both the OFDM format and transmission data rate. For the proposed PTC method, we have analytically derived the transmission model with CD and first order PMD, and theoretically prove the PTC indeed can jointly compensate both CD and PMD. The numerical results show that, with the PTC method, both the previously proposed gapped and interleaved OFDM formats behave virtually immune to both CD and PMD with a price of 3-dB OSNR penalty in back-to-back (BtB). Aimed to mitigate this BtB 3-dB penalty, further partial PTC approach is proposed for trading the PMD tolerance with the BtB OSNR sensitivity. The interleaved OFDM system is found to gain profits in terms of lower sensitivity with the partial coding.