Comparison of the combined effect of PMD and PDL on 10 and 40 Gbits/second systems

The system outage probabilities (probabilities that BER>10-12) due to polarization mode dispersion (PMD), polarization dependent loss (PDL) and their combination are calculated for 10 and 40 Gb/s systems. It is found that the combination of PMD and PDL has a stronger impact on 40 Gb/s system than on 10 Gb/s system.