Energy Efficient Low-Cost Gigabit Plastic Optical Fiber Links for Automotive Communication

The pervasive demand for high-data communication has necessitated effective low-cost solutions for short links. In the context of in-vehicle communication, plastic optical fibers (POF) with inexpensive lasers and photodetectors are viable candidates. The advantage of POF is high data rates, longer lengths, energy efficiency, light weigth communicarion system when compared to the current technologies, which leads to the reduction in carbon footprint. Moreover, POFs offer extended reach capabilities compared to standard automotive ethernet, enabling gigabit communication for large vehicles like buses, trains, and airplanes. In this work, we have implemented an energy-efficient Discrete Multitone (DMT) M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (M-QAM) POF link with an adaptive data rate. We evaluate the frequency response of the fiber using a modeling-based approach and apply bit loading to effectively stretch the link limits imposed due the fiber and optoelectronic components’ frequency responses. Subsequently, we employ various optical OFDM-based DMT implementations and experimentally evaluate achievable data rates. We have experimentally demonstrated a 1.84Gb/s POF system with a bit error rate of 10-9 over 15 m,1.78Gb/s over 30 m and 1.61Gb/s 50 m POF channel that uses a code (255, 223) Reed Solomon (RS) error control code. We also show that the designed link achieves a data rate of 2.73Gb/s over 15 m,and 2.5Gb/s 50 m POF channel, while using very inexpensive optical components, with the use of bit loading, the 50 m POF link achieved a spectral efficiency of 8.74 bit/s/Hz