Demonstration of broad-band PMD mitigation in the presence of PDL through distributed fast polarization scrambling and forward-error correction

We experimentally demonstrate broad-band mitigation of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) in the presence of polarization-dependent loss (PDL) by using distributed fast polarization scramblers in systems adopting forward-error correction. The combined penalty of PMD and PDL is smaller than the sum of the individual penalties, which shows the robustness of the PMD mitigation scheme against PDL and the enhancement of PMD tolerance improvement in the presence of PDL. The desired number of scramblers and their distribution are also discussed.