Ultra-broadband optical wireless communication system with single channel imaging receiver and multi-mode fiber for personal area networks

Optical wireless technology has been considered as a promising candidate to provide high-speed wireless connectivity in personal work/living spaces. Previously we proposed and demonstrated a high-speed indoor communication system by incorporating limited mobility with localization function. Furthermore, we showed that by using a novel single channel imaging receiver, better system performance can be achieved and the demonstration was based on single-mode fiber due to its low transmission loss feature. However, in most already installed inbuilding optical fiber distribution networks, multi-mode fiber was deployed since it is low-cost and easy to handle. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed optical wireless personal area communication system with single channel imaging receiver based on multi-mode fiber. In addition, the wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technology is also incorporated to realize an ultra-broadband connectivity in wireless personal area networks. The results show that a simultaneous operation of a 4 × 10 Gbps down-link and a 400 Mbps up-link can be realized simultaneously and the beam footprint is larger than 1 m even when a channel selecting optical bandpass filter with ~77% transmission efficiency was used.