OSNR Margin Brought by Nonlinear Regenerators in the Presence of PMD and Amplified Spontaneous Emission Noise

The behavior of a 2R optical regenerator in a link limited by amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise and polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) is investigated in detail in this paper. 2R regeneration techniques are well known for combating the accumulation ASE noise in an optical signal, but their behavior in the presence of PMD is mostly unknown. Here, we propose a general method to calculate the total outage probability in a link including a cascade of optical regenerators. Through the use of semi-analytical models, we study the ability of 2R optical regenerators to combat at the same time PMD distortions and ASE noise accumulation in an optical signal, and show their interesting potential to counter independently both detrimental effects.