Hybrid hinge model for polarization-mode dispersion in installed fiber transmission systems

A hybrid hinge model is proposed to characterize polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) in installed optical fiber communication systems. The model reduces to previously considered PMD generation mechanisms in special cases, but can also simulate more general hinge behavior. A combination of importance sampling and the cross entropy method is used to calculate the probability density function of the differential group delay and the outage probability for individual wavelength bands, and results are averaged over all wavelength bands to obtain the non-compliant capacity ratio (NCR). These results suggest that, for practical outage specifications, the NCR of a system lies between upper and lower bounds provided by the isotropic hinge model and the waveplate hinge model, respectively.