Nonlinear signal-noise interactions in dispersion managed coherent PM-QPSK systems in the presence of PMD.

Considering the polarization mode dispersion(PMD), the transmission penalty induced by nonlinear signal-noise interactions (NSNI) between the amplified spontaneous emission noise (ASE) and the information signal is investigated numerically for 40(100)G dispersion-managed(DM) polarization-multiplexed quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) systems. We show that for single-channel PM-QPSK systems, PMD is helpful to reduce the NSNI-induced penalty. For multi-channel PM-QPSK system, however, the NSNI-induced nonlinear penalty is significantly enhanced by PMD, especially at low bit-rate. Our results show that due to the NSNI, the reduction of allowed input power that gives 1-dB Q penalty after 1600-km nonlinear transmission will increase from 1dB without PMD to 3.7dB with PMD for 42.8-Gbit/s coherent return-to-zero (RZ)-PM-QPSK systems.