An experimental demonstration of a soft-failure approach to PMD mitigation in an installed optical link.

We present a field-trial implementation of the soft-failure approach to polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) impairment mitigation, in which information about the PMD of the installed link is utilized by our modified control plane software to make decisions on data routing over available links. This allows us to maintain loss-free end-to-end data service, even at high PMD levels.