Noncompliant capacity ratio for systems with an arbitrary number of polarization hinges

We study the statistics of transmission impairments due to polarization-mode dispersion in systems characterized by the hinge model. In particular, we validate the use of a computationally efficient expression for the probability density function (PDF) of the differential group delay (DGD) of systems with an arbitrary number of hinges. We then combine this expression for the PDF of the DGD with the outage map approach to compute outage probabilities and noncompliant capacity ratios for transmission links with varying numbers of sections (from 4 up to 20), each for several values of mean DGD and different system parameters.