High-Capacity Optical Wireless Communication by Directed Narrow Beams

Optical wireless communication (OWC) by means of 2D-steered narrow infrared beams can provide non-shared secure high-capacity connections to individual users, at high user densities. This keynote talk presents an overview of the system architecture and the essential techniques needed for bi-directional broadband indoor/short-reach OWC: simultaneous steering of multiple beams individually, accurately localizing the users and automatically aligning their down- and upstream beams, and capturing the beams with wide-field-of-view broadband receivers in order to avoid tedious alignment. Real-time GbE streaming of high-definition video movies via bi-directional OWC links to individual users has been demonstrated.