Comparision of simulation and emulation of polarization dependent loss in short fibre links

In this paper, a novel simulation tool has been developed to examine the statistics of polarization dependent loss (PDL) using short fibre links in the first instance. Hardware emulator which has been previously developed [1] was used to generate measurement results with the same settings as the simulator. The results show that the simulator works reliably, so it can now be used to simulate the statistical results for more realistic long distance communications systems. The results also prove that the PDL variance reaches a minimum when each of the fibre lengths is approximately equal.