Bit error rate measurements of fiber optic network through ethernet analysers

Abstract

This paper describes the end-to-end performance of single mode Fiber Optic Network (FON), implemented for Unmanned Surveillance System (USS) application for the detection and tracking of land and sea based moving targets. Optical fibers are widely in fiber optic communications which permits transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data rates) than other forms of communication. Bit Error Rate (BER) is the ultimate key index parameter in assessing the FON for transmission of digital data from one location to another location. In this paper, in addition to BER, throughput and RFC 2544 testing were also performed over the FON using dual port VeEX ethernet analyzers. Both the fiber and copper ports of ethernet analyzers were exercised for obtaining the performance metric parameters of FON. Apart from BER measurements using ethernet analyzers, Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) has also been used for checking the optical signal loss over FON. The performance analysis of BER at different data rates and the factors affecting BER are also discussed in this paper.