Anisotropic hinge model for polarization-mode dispersion in installed fibers.

We discuss a generalized waveplate hinge model to characterize anisotropic effects associated with the hinge model of polarization-mode dispersion in installed systems. In this model, the action of the hinges is a random time-dependent rotation about a fixed axis. We obtain the probability density function of the differential group delay and the outage probability of an individual wavelength band using a combination of importance sampling and the cross-entropy method, and we then compute the noncompliant capacity ratio by averaging over wavelength bands. The results show that there are significant differences between the outage statistics predicted by isotropic and anisotropic hinge models.