Evaluation of modal noise in graded-index silica and plastic optical fiber links for radio over multimode fiber systems

We have evaluated and compared modal noise induced in a graded-index silica multimode fiber (GI-MMF) link and a graded-index plastic optical fiber (GI-POF) link with the misaligned fiber connections. In radio over fiber (RoF) systems using these optical fibers, modal noise appears as unwanted amplitude modulation in the received signal, and results in degradation of the RoF transmission performance. In this work, we have evaluated the modal noise induced in GI-MMFs and GI-POFs with its same core diameter of 50 μm. Our results show that GI-POFs have an inherently higher tolerance to misaligned connection and less modal noise than GI-MMFs in terms of both the error-vector magnitude and the speckle pattern of the transmitted signals.