US Patent 7532822 Clock recovery from an optical signal with polarization impairments

A method of recovering a clock signal from an optical signal received through an optical communications system. A digital sample stream is processed to generate a dispersion compensated signal. The dispersion compensated signal is then tapped to obtain upper side band and lower side band signals of each received polarization of the optical signal. The upper side band sand lower side band signals are then processed to compensate polarization dependent impairments and the clock recovered from the resulting optimized.