Polarization-Dependent Loss Mitigation via Orthogonal Design Precoding and Interference Cancellation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that an orthogonal design precoding and interference cancellation scheme effectively mitigates polarization-dependent loss in practical 16-QAM systems, with improved simplicity and robustness over prior methods.

Contribution

It extends previous capacity-achieving schemes to practical 16-QAM systems with Chase decoding, introducing a simpler near-optimal variation requiring only one inner code.

Findings

The scheme remains highly effective at mitigating PDL in practical settings.

The alternative scheme requires only one inner code and performs well without PDL.

The proposed methods are more practical for real-world implementation.

Abstract

Recent work by Shehadeh and Kschischang provides a simple capacity-achieving scheme for channels with polarization-dependent loss (PDL) under common modeling assumptions via a careful choice of orthogonal-design-based precoding and interference cancellation. This letter extends that work with a simulation-based demonstration showing that this scheme remains highly effective at mitigating PDL in the highly practical setting of 16-QAM with Chase-decoded extended Hamming inner codes rather than the near-capacity inner codes considered in the original work. An alternative near-optimal variation of this scheme is also provided requiring only one inner code rather than two and suffering no penalty in the absence of PDL, making it much more practical.