Plastic optical fiber for wide field-of-view optical wireless receiver

This paper demonstrates a working indoor optical wireless link for smart environment applications. The system utilizes a wide field-of-view (FOV) optical wireless receiver through cleaving the tip of large core plastic optical fibers (POFs) attached to the detector. The quality of the optical link is quantified through bit error rate (BER) measurements. The experimental results show a wide FOV with the uncoded BER in the order of 10−3 for transmission distances up to 35 cm when using two POFs for signal collection. The distance can be improved further by increasing the number of fibers. The transmitted signal format and how the BER measurement is achieved are discussed at length. In addition, details are provided for the design of the electronics to establish the optical wireless link.