A detailed study of fiber-coil based polarization controllers is
performed. Firstly, a method to deterministically calculate the
polarization controller configuration in order to transform between
any two states of polarization is presented. In a second stage, the
case in which the configuration angles are randomly changed is
studied. The cases of a single polarization controller and of the
system obtained with the concatenation of several polarization
controllers are analyzed. For both cases a general expression for
the variance of the Stokes parameters is obtained. Using this
expression it is demonstrated that is possible to achieve uniform
polarization scattering using a concatenation of fiber-coil based
polarization controllers. Finally, it is shown that fiber-coil based
polarization controllers can be used to emulate both first and
second order polarization mode dispersion.