Concatenation of polarization dispersion in single-mode fibers: A Monte-Carlo simulation

We present a model for non-ideal long single-mode fiber links affected by polarization mode dispersion. It leads to simple expressions for the overall polarization delay and for the r.m.s. width of the impulse response, which entail systematic simulation on personal computers within reasonable CPU times. Simulations show that the mean differential group delay and the double r.m.s. width of the impulse response coincide in such a way that both quantities can characterize the fiber polarization mode dispersion. In particular, both grow as the square root of the link length when the correlation length of the perturbation is much smaller then the fiber length. This confirms the results obtained by other authors under restrictive approximations.