SI-POF Supporting Power-Over-Fiber in Multi-Gbit/s Transmission for In-Home Networks

We propose the integration of power-over-fiber (PoF) in home networks with multi Gbit/s data transmission based on wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) in step-index plastic optical fibers (SI-POF). Different powering architectures are described. The efficiencies of different components are discussed to address the maximum remote energy that can be delivered. Experimental results show the ability of the system to deliver several mW of optical power with negligible data signal quality degradation and with BER of 1 × 10-10. The potential of utilizing PoF in combination with low-loss WDM-POF to optically powering multiple devices for specific in-home applications and IoT ecosystems is discussed. A PoF scalability analysis is detailed.