Indoor coverage improvement of MB-OFDM UWB signals with radio over POF system

A radio over fiber system using the fluorinated based polymer multimode fibers (PMMF) is presented in this paper for the enhancement of the indoor coverage of the multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing ultra-wideband standard (MB-OFDM UWB) inside a building. A preliminary part related the cost analysis owing to glass and polymer multimode fiber deployment inside a fiber network is reported. The study of the physical properties of the polymer optical fibers (core diameter, numerical aperture, differential mode delays, modal bandwidth…) is firstly performed in order to effectively exhibit the potentialities and the robustness of such fibers to be used in a low cost radio over fiber system. The DMD measurements of four fluorinated based polymer optical fiber are reported. The designed system operates at 850 nm with commercial off the shelf (COTS) devices combined to the intensity modulation/direct detection technique. The opportunity of using polymer fibers and COTS components to improve the indoor coverage of the MB-OFDM UWB standard is so reported by the measurement of the Error Vector Magnitude or the Relative Constellation Error variation as a function of the system parameters (RF power, optical attenuation, fiber length…) as well as the compliance of the eye diagram with the mask testing. By the way, the transmission performance of both 200 and 480 Mbps signals is demonstrated over up to 200 m link length of polymer multimode fibers: transmission penalties are quantified by relative constellation error with values under the standard requirements. A comparative study with classical OM2 50 μm based glass multimode fiber having the same bandwidth/length product than the PMMF is done.