“…Polarization domain monitoring techniques exploit the alterations in the polarization characteristics of optical signals, caused by various channel degradations, for the effective monitoring of these impairments. These techniques can monitor signal and noise powers (and hence, OSNR), for example, through polarization nulling [52]- [55], as well as PMD of the fiber link, for example, by measuring the degree-of-polarization (DOP) of the received signal [46], [56], [57]. These techniques have the advantage of being transparent to data rates and modulation formats.…”