Challenges in the integration of plastic optical fibre technology in aircrafts

Plastic Optical Fibres (POF) have been well established as a media able to offer high speed at low cost in short distance communications such as domestic and transport networks of which avionic networks are just another example. In fact, their flexibility and ease of installation have turned the interest of the avionic industry into polymer fibres as the best candidate to compete in the replacement by fibre of some of the aircraft data links. However, although POF is a very promising transmission media for avionic networks, there are issues that have to be addressed before its integration into the airplane. Here, we review these issues focusing on the problems of modelling these highly multimode fibres with strong diffusion. We propose a two-step procedure to integrate a matrix model of POF and its components into commercial software frameworks.