Enhancing the Transmission Performance of Step Index Plastic Optical Fiber

The use of Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) cable has the potential to enhance broadband transmission, particularly in the indoor access network. The POF cable offers a cost-effective solution because it is much easier to install and less expensive than glass optical fiber. The biggest drawback of the POF cable is intermodal dispersion, which reduces the link bandwidth of a 100 m length of cable to approximately 40 MHz. Numerous studies are being conducted to enhance the bandwidth-length product of POF. This work seeks to minimize the intermodal dispersion of the cable by finding optimal materials for the core and cladding of the cable with the improved bandwidth-length product. The results obtained indicate that the optimal core and cladding materials have refractive indices of 1.4865 and 1.4756, respectively. The intermodal dispersion per unit length is found to be 36.169 ps/m. The bandwidth of 100 m of the improved POF cable is therefore 121.65 MHz. A RoF communication system based on the developed POF is designed using the Optisystem16 software tool. The Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the system in terms of quality factor is evaluated. A maximum achievable POF cable length of 117 m is obtained for a transmission data rate of 1 Gbps with an acceptable quality factor of 7.0.