Polarization recovery in optical polarization shift keying systems

For the first time, a solution to the problem of recovering and tracking the signal constellation at the receiver side for binary and octonary digital optical transmission systems employing the modulation of polarization (POLSK) is proposed and analyzed. The effect of two recovery algorithms on the system performance is evaluated in terms of power penalty induced at P(e)=10/sup -9/, acquisition and tracking speed, and hardware complexity. The results show that very small penalties are obtainable in practical situations by properly designing the recovery algorithms.