The effect of using different materials on erbium-doped fiber amplifiers for indoor applications

•This study is based on the selection of best candidate material for the highest transmission bit-rate under the same operating conditions.•Two different optical sources are employed namely continuous-wave laser (CW) and vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL).•Fluorite material has the largest value of gain and the lowest value of noise figure in compared to silica material has the lowest value.•FT/PTFPMA fiber channel has a bit-rate of 108.48 Gb/s with a maximum Q-factor of 2.47, minimum BER of 0.006539, gain value of 25.95 dB, and noise figure of 24.44 dB. This paper investigated the different materials of optical fibers, two of them are plastic optical fibers that are namely polysulfone (PSU)/vinyl-phenyl acetate (VPAC) with refractive indices of 1.63/1.567, and the second plastic material namely sapphire (S)/polysulfone (PSU) with refractive indices of 1.77/1.63. One of the other materials consists of fluorite (FT)/polytetrafluorophenylmethacrylate (PTFPMA) with refractive indices of 1.433/1.422, where the second material consists of fluoride (FD)/poly methylmethacrylate (PMMA) with refractive indices of 1.56/1.49. Finally, the third material consists of silica (Si)/tetrafluoropropylmethacrylate (TFPMA) with refractive indices of 1.46/1.373. The simulation results are done by using optiwave simulation version 13. FT/PTFPMA fiber channel has outlined 19.23 Tb/s bit-rate with maximum Q-factor of 11.01, a minimum bit error rate of 1.05 × 10−28, gain value of 36.57 dB, and noise figure of 5.67 dB in the presence of vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). It is observed that VCSEL has superior to continuous wave (CW) laser by the improvement of the performance parameters understudy at the same operating conditions.