Bidirectional Gigabit transmission over a single SI-POF for home networking

This paper reports on some recent results on transmission over large core plastic optical fibers (POF) developed in the EU project ALPHA, inside a Workpackage focused on physical layer solutions for home networking. In particular, we demonstrated a Gigabit Ethernet bidirectional transmission over a single POF running to distances up to 20 meters. We believe that the solution is attractive for very low cost consumer electronic short-distance cabling at high data rate requiring extremely simple installation and where small diameter cable is a must, as it happens in brown-field domotic installations that need to reuse existing power ducts. The solution proposed in this paper achieve Gigabit Ethernet bidirectional transmission over a cable that has 2.2 mm overall diameter (including protective coating), significantly outperforming in this respect UTP copper cable (Cat. 5 and above), which have a diameter of the order of 5 mm. We show in this paper experimental solutions running at 20 meters using standard binary On-Off keying at the transmitter and electronic equalization at the receiver.