A novel optical wireless MIMO architecture and its application

A novel coherent optical multiple-input multiple-output architecture is proposed for wireless communication links to mitigate atmospheric turbulence effects. Transmitter optical signals operate at distinct carrier frequencies to allow the received optical signals to be separately processed. The accumulated phase noise in each transmission branch can be independently compensated electronically. Based on the proposed architecture, several popular diversity combining techniques are considered for system performance evaluation. The presented results demonstrate substantial error performance improvement over a single-input single-output coherent optical wireless link.