System Performance Variations Due to Partially Polarized Noise in a Receiver

Abstract—In this letter, we systematically investigate effects of partially polarized noise in a receiver. We introduce a relationship between the factor and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that ac-counts for effects of partially polarized noise. We derive an expres-sion for the distribution of the factor for a fixed SNR, and we val-idate our results by comparison to back-to-back experiments. We show that the system performance varies depending on the angle between the Stokes vectors of the signal and the noise as well as the degree-of-polarization of the noise. Highly polarized noise will cause a larger variation of the system performance. Index Terms—Optical fiber communication, optical fiber polar-ization, optical noise, optical receivers, factor. I