Thermal Noise Effect on Receiver Sensitivity in FTTH Customer Access Network – Simulation Approach

Thermal noise is generated naturally by thermal agitation of electron in a conductor commonly found in optoelectronic (O/E) device. In spite of the optical medium is totally immune to noises but it is not exception to occur in receiver parts. In communication, thermal noises have major influenced to the quality of receiver. It is directly proportional to the resistance and temperature. The lower the thermal noise the higher and expensive is this receiver sensitivity. The paper starts comprehensive study on thermal noise effect to the network performance in terms of bit-error rate (BER), maximum Q-factor, eye height, and maximum distance. Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network is used as a test field to study the impact of two different values of thermal noise to the network parameters. We use the receiver sensitivity fixed at -22 dBm to study and analyze the parameters. The Opti-System simulation is used to obtain the desired research objective.