Remote power over fiber electro-mechanical modulation for enabling hybrid sensor networks

This work presents a power-efficient solution based on Power over Fiber technology that combines and enables the use of electronic devices in fiber optic networks. The optical carrier is modulated via a microelectromechanical variable optical attenuator, using the processed sensor data, which is encoded in a frequency shift keying technique. To illustrate the concept, a 50-km remote environmental station is powered by energy harvesting techniques to provide the requisite power, and a low-power microcontroller encodes the data from electronic sensors. The data was successfully retrieved, achieving data rates of up to 1.5 kbps.