Characterization of multimode fiber for 10+ Gb/s operation by predicting ISI from bandwidth measurement data

A common way to chakcterize the quality of data transmission in high speed optical communication networks, for example lGbis or IO-Gbis Ethemet local area networks, is to use the so-called eye diagram to determine inter-symbol interference [ I]-[3] The degradation in transmission quality is quantified by the amount of eye closure. For multimode fibers in high-speed networks using 10Gb/s VCSEL sources, the IS1 penalty depends on the characteristics of both the source and the optical fiber, particularly the mode group delays (a fiber property) and the relative modal power distribution (a source property) [4].