Nowadays, fiber to the Home/Curb/Building/Cabinet (FTTx) services that interconnect homes with a standard glass optical fiber cables to the core/access optical networks have brought the optical fiber at the doorsteps of our homes. However, the last few miles in home access network is still based on the limited bandwidth electronic component which supports by the cooper wires e.g. Cat-5, 6. The rapid growth of personal smart/mobile electronic devices with new developments such as video on demand, High Definition (HD) and three-Dimension (3D) television (TV), cloud computing, video conferences, etc. has been proposed new challenges for the next generation high bandwidth demand required for subscribers in home access network. In order to meet the more demanding expectations of the end user with new developments, it is necessary to improve the physical infrastructure of the existing in home networks in order to obtain the best ratio between quality of service and price of implementation. Plastic optical fibers (POFs) are point out as a promising transmission medium for short-range communication in compare to the “classic” single/multimode glass optical fibers and current cooper wire technology developments. The main advantages of POF are its easy to install, easy splicing and the possibility of using low cost optical transceivers, capability of being robust, and immunity to electromagnetic noise interference. However, the benefits of large-core POFs come at the expense of a less bandwidth and a higher attenuation than silica-based solution. The main objective of this doctoral dissertation is to explore the possibilities and develop low cost, short reach, high data rate POF-links for in home networks applications. This thesis investigates the use of multilevel modulation in particular, pulse amplitude modulation (PAM in combination of the receiver equalizer in order to overcome the bandwidth limitations of the graded index POFs. The possibility of the using multiple channels over a single fiber to increase the capacity of POF systems using commercially available multimode components is also analyzed in this dissertation. Moreover, a low cost Digitised radio signal over plastic fiber system is proposed and evaluated to deliver digital baseband data for wireline and wireless users in home access network. The deployment will be specified in terms of performance, maximum rates and any degradation that might appear in the network. Furthermore, the possibilities of the microstructured fibers in telecommunication application will be studied with main emphasis on their structural design. The photonic crystal fibers made of different highly nonlinear materials with different structures are optimized to achieve ultra-flat dispersion, high nonlinearity and low confinement loss over a broad range of wavelengths in the perspective of their usage in telecommunication applications.

In this paper a highly polarization maintaining birefringent photonic crystal fiber at telecommunication window is reported via Full-Vectorial Finite Element Method (FV-FEM). By taking triangular lattice of three ring hexagonal structure PCF with suitable designing parameters such as symmetrical elliptical hole along radial axis of ellipticity a/b=5µm, air hole diameter d=1µm and pitch Λ=2.3µm, high birefringence (2.437×10-3) with small effective mode area(9.47µm²) and beat length (0.64cm) are found at wavelength 1.55µm.

This paper presents a new circular photonic crystal fiber (C-PCF) for effective dispersion compensation covering E to L wavelength bands ranging from 1360-1625 nm. To investigate its guiding properties, finite element method (FEM) with a perfectly matched layer absorbing boundary condition is used. From our numerical simulation, it is found that the designed C-PCF simultaneously shows a large negative dispersion of about -248.65 to -1069 ps/(nm.km) over E to L wavelength bands and a relative dispersion slope (RDS) exactly equal to that of a single mode fiber (SMF) at 1.55 µm wavelength. It is also found that residual dispersion after compesating 40 km long SMF is within ±62 ps/nm which ensures application of C-PCF in high speed WDM system. Besides, dispersion slope, slope compensation ratio, effective area and confinement loss of the proposed C-PCF are also evaluated and discussed.

We present a hybrid cladding photonic crystal fiber for shaping high nonlinear and flattened dispersion in a wide range of wavelengths. The new structure adopts hybrid cladding with different pitches, air-holes diameters and air-holes arrayed fashions. The full-vector finite element method with perfectly matched layer is used to investigate the characteristics of the hybrid cladding photonic crystal fiber such as nonlinearity and dispersion properties. The influence of the cladding structure parameters on the nonlinear coefficient and geometric dispersion is analyzed. High nonlinear coefficient and the dispersion properties of fibers are tailored by adjusting the cladding structure parameters. A novel hybrid cladding photonic crystal fiber with high nonlinear coefficient and dispersion flattened which is suited for supercontinuum generation is designed.

Agradecimentos: The authors acknowledge the financial support from CNPq (Brazilian National Council for Research) and the CePOF-Unicamp (Center for Optics and Photonics) supported by FAPESP (São Paulo State Foundation for Research)