Design of Radio Over Plastic Optical Fibre for Broadband Indoor Access Network

Abstract

Indoor wireless traffic increases exponentially. Radio over fibre technology has been used to provide broadband services in the access network. Plastic Optical Fibre (POF) has been considered as a promising waveguide to be used as backhaul link for indoor access network. The RoF system uses an improved POF cable as a backhaul. A photonic antenna is developed by integrating a microstrip patch antenna with an opto-electronic converter. A standard inset fed microstrip patch antenna used for the wireless transmission and reception is designed using CST software tool. A RoF communication system based on the developed POF is designed and simulated using Optisystem 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 for an On-Off Keying (OOK) transmission data rate of 1 Gbps with an acceptable Quality factor of 7.0 is obtained. When the developed RoF system was used to transmit 10 Gbps and 50 Gbps data, the achievable cable lengths reduced to 80 m and 63 m, respectively. Keywords— Plastic Optical Fibre, RoF, photonic antenna, and modal dispersion