Introducing energy efficiency in the VDE 0885-763 standard for high speed communication over plastic optical fibers

In September 2013, the VDE 0885-763 standard for high-speed communication over plastic optical fiber (POF) will be published. The new standard enables 1 Gb/s communication over 50 meters of POF and is intended for use in automotive, industrial, and home networking applications. One of the goals of the standard is to achieve good energy efficiency, and to that end it incorporates a low power mode. This is similar to the case of Ethernet where a low-power mode was introduced by the Energy Efficient Ethernet (IEEE 802.3az) standard in 2010. In this article, the energy efficiency mechanisms incorporated in the VDE 0885-763 standard are described and evaluated. The evaluation is done by simulation, and the results are also compared to those of Energy Efficient Ethernet. The conclusion is that VDE 0885-763 will provide good energy efficiency even at low/medium loads.