Quantitative Estimation of Power Loss in Optical Fiber by Considering the Fresnel Reflection at the Boundaries

Abstract

Optical fiber has become an indispensable tool in our everyday life because of it’s special properties to send light to long distances without losing much of it’s signal power, compared to conventional wire. Although optical fiber is proven to be more efficient and very fast in delivering signal in the area of communication industry, still some losses of signals occur inside the fiber optic cable. Most of the losses have been described in standard text books viz. scattering loss, bending losses, absorption loss etc are pretty straight forward when one calculates the loss of signal power inside an optical fiber. In this article, the loss of signal is calculated and studied by considering Fresnel’s equation (due to Fresnel’s reflection at the boundary) along with absorption loss due to materials property. Although Fresnel’s loss is very small but it could be significant if the fiber connection is thousands of kilometers long and there are multiple joints of different fibers. This Fresnel’s loss only happens at the boundary of a material. For simplicity the loss due to scattering, bending of rays and any other types of losses have been ignore in this work, except absorption loss.