STUDY OF ATTENUATION AND BENDING LOSSES IN SIGNAL TRANSMISSION OVER STEP INDEX MULTIMODE PMMA FIBERS

Plastic optical fibers (POFs) are highly promising transmission media for short distance optical communication in transmitting information from source to destination by sending light pulses. Compared to glass optical fibers, POFs offer many advantages such as low cost, huge flexibility and ease of installation. In contrast, POFs have the drawback of their relatively high loss. Accordingly, a continued research on the loss analysis of plastic fiber based optical fiber communication systems is necessary to examine their performance in data transmission. This paper deals with an experimental study of signal attenuation and bending loss arising from signal transmission over a set of step index multimode polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) plastic optical fibers of dissimilar length.