Green Technology Solution for Small-World Communication Using Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) and Light Emitting Diode (LED)—Design and Application

Abstract

Plastic optical fiber (POF) has become a dominant technology, with potential to be fully utilized in a small-world communication system because it has many advantages over existing systems. Among several high-speed solutions, POF can be considered as one of the most promising technologies because of its attractive features, such as efficiency, user friendly, environmentally friendly, low maintenance and economic metric, compared to silica fiber optics. POF devices are divided into several types based on fabrication techniques and continue to spread to a number of applications that have a high impact in the world of communication today. This paper will discuss the overall POF technology and sustainable solutions for small-world communication from device fabrication, device types, configurations and applications. Discussion will focus on the technologies that have been developed in our laboratory concerning a user-friendly approach, energy efficiency, ease of maintenance and high-performance solution. The performance of our optical splitter is comparable to commercialized devices that are less than 5 dB of insertion loss and 0.53 dB of excess loss. This sustainable solution in high-speed communication is the first reported up to this time.