Analysis of PMD compensators with fixed DGD using importance sampling

In this letter, we use importance sampling to analyze polarization-mode dispersion compensators with a constant differential group delay (DGD) element. We optimize the value of the fixed DGD element of the compensator with respect to the outage probability. We show that the optimum value of the fixed DGD element of the compensator can reduce the outage probability by several orders of magnitude, even though it does not provide a substantial reduction of the average penalty due to polarization-mode dispersion in the cases that we studied. By contrast, choosing the fixed DGD element to maximally reduce the average penalty may lead to an outage probability that is orders of magnitude larger than the optimal choice.