Abstract

Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) is considered to be one of the most serious obstacles in the high speed optical telecommunication systems. This thesis focuses on a deterministic approach to both compensation and emulation of PMD. Most PMD compensation schemes in the literature rely on feedback loops to search for the optimum control parameters in the compensator. These schemes often suffer from slow response time and are limited to compensating the low orders of PMD. Adding control parameters to enable higher-order PMD compensation further increases the complexity of the feedback algorithm and its response time. As PMD can vary as fast as on a millisecond time scale, a potential method to alleviate this problem is to employ a deterministic approach to PMD compensation where the PMD parameters are first diagnosed and the compensator then set accordingly. One of the most challenging problems to this deterministic approach is the real-time monitoring of the PMD information. We propose an improved version of the PMD estimation technique using polarization scrambling and optical filtering. Once