Statistical PMD and PDL effects emulator based on polarization maintaining optical fiber segments

Low cost statistical PMD/PDL emulator is presented. The emulator was initially designed as a classical PMD emulator. But PDL measurements of the designed emulator show that it can be also used as statistical PDL emulator. The emulator was constructed by concatenating 15 highly birefringence optical fiber segments and randomly varying the mode coupling between them, by rotating the polarization state between them. The achieved numerical and experimental results show that the designed emulator can mimic the polarization effects (PMD and PDL) of a real modern optical fiber link.