Multimode Fiber for Optical Access Network Applications

Multimode fiber (MMF) has core dimension much larger than that of single mode fiber (SMF), thus, substantially reducing fiber alignment constraints. The subsequent network construction and installation cost will be lower and MMF is expected to proliferate as optics reaches out to end users. In this paper, the performance of an access network based on hybrid transmission media of both SMF and MMF is characterized. The MMF deployed has high performance optimized for a broad wavelength transmission window spanning from 1300 to 1550 nm. A centralized light source (CLS) architecture is used as it has attracted much attention recently due to its wavelength management flexibility and cost reduction potential at customers' premises. The proposed passive optical network (PON) is implemented in a test bed and its performance is verified by bit error ratio (BER) measurement. High-speed data transmission is further conducted to evaluate signal integrity in MMF. Results show that we can implement high-performance PON containing both SMF and MMF infrastructure with existing transceiver technology